Story thread · 2 reports / 2 sources

Enterprises are overpaying for simple AI queries — Snowflake's gateway now auto-routes to cut costs up to 3x

venturebeat.com · 3h · first reportShare

Enterprise teams running AI agents at scale are finding that a single model handles every task poorly — either the model is too expensive for simple questions or not capable enough for hard ones. Model routing, which picks the right model for each task automatically, is becoming the fix. Snowflake’s Cortex AI Gateway now offers dynamic model routing to address that: enterprises can select “auto” instead of a fixed model, and the system routes each task to whichever model offers the best combination of quality and cost. Snowflake said the capability can cut token costs by as much as 3x on some workloads — a figure from the company’s own internal testing — after finding that simple questions were often handled by its most capable model, making responses more expensive and slower than necessary. The move lands amid a broader industry shift toward automated model routing. Databricks, AWS, Google Cloud and Nvidia have all announced some form of model routing technology. Snowflake argues tha