Snowflake Cortex Analyst vs Databricks Genie: Both Depend on Manual Curation

Snowflake Cortex Analyst and Databricks Genie both allow business users to query data warehouses using natural language, but each requires manually curated context before delivering reliable results. Cortex Analyst relies on a hand-authored semantic model file, while Genie depends on a curated Space with example queries, meaning accuracy in both tools tracks directly to the quality of that human-maintained context. When a user's question falls outside the curated scope, both tools can return confident but potentially inaccurate answers without signalling that a boundary was crossed. Neither product crosses platform boundaries or verifies join paths before executing queries — limitations the article describes as architectural rather than fixable feature gaps. The core finding is that organisations evaluating these tools are effectively assessing their own capacity to author and sustain context files, a task that often lacks a clear owner or visible reward.