Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, is partnering with leading industry players and ecosystem vendors, including Salesforce, BlackRock, dbt Labs, and RelationalAI, to lead the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI), a new open source initiative.
This initiative introduces a common, vendor-neutral semantic model specification that standardizes how semantic metadata is defined and shared—ensuring consistent business logic across AI and business intelligence (BI) applications.
“At Snowflake, we’ve long believed that interoperability and open standards are essential to unlocking the full potential of AI with your data,” said Christian Kleinerman, EVP of product, Snowflake. “With the Open Semantic Interchange initiative, we are proud to be leading the charge alongside our partners to solve a foundational challenge for AI—the lack of a common semantic standard. This initiative reflects the industry coming together, not competing, to solve shared challenges and build a more connected, open ecosystem for all.”
With OSI, semantic data is interoperable and reliable across platforms, empowering organizations to scale AI and BI with greater confidence, speed, and trust, according to the vendors.
Key goals of the initiative include:
- Enhancing interoperability across tools and platforms: In a fragmented data landscape, organizations often rely on a patchwork of AI, BI, and analytics tools. OSI establishes a shared semantic standard so all tools can “speak the same language,” giving companies the flexibility to adopt best-of-breed technologies without losing consistency in metrics or business logic.
- Accelerating the adoption of AI and BI applications: Many organizations struggle to scale AI and BI because inconsistent semantics undermine trust. By standardizing how semantics are defined and exchanged, OSI ensures data is governed, consistent, and context-rich — enabling more accurate, trustworthy AI insights and faster adoption.
- Streamlining operations and reducing complexity: Without a shared semantic specification, data and AI teams often spend weeks reconciling conflicting definitions or duplicating work across platforms. The OSI eliminates this challenge with a common specification, reducing overhead and freeing data and AI teams to focus on innovation instead of troubleshooting.
Fragmented data definitions remain one of the biggest barriers to AI adoption, making a shared open standard essential to ensuring semantic consistency wherever data is used. Rather than addressing this challenge in silos, industry and ecosystem leaders are co-leading the Open Semantic Interchange alongside a growing coalition of partners, including: Alation, Atlan, BlackRock, Blue Yonder, Cube, dbt Labs, Elementum AI, Hex, Honeydew, Mistral AI, Omni, RelationalAI, Salesforce, Select Star, Sigma, Snowflake, and ThoughtSpot.
With momentum building as more participants join, this joint effort marks a decisive shift away from closed, single-vendor approaches toward a future built on interoperability, standardization, and open source collaboration.
Together, the industry is laying the foundation for trusted, scalable AI adoption and unlocking the next wave of innovation, Snowflake said.
“The future of AI depends on trust—and trust starts with consistent, reliable data,” said Southard Jones, chief product officer, Tableau. “By co-leading the Open Semantic Interchange with Snowflake and our partners, we’re building the foundation every AI agent and BI application needs: a common semantic framework that preserves meaning across platforms. This is the Rosetta Stone for business data, ensuring our customers can harness trusted insights with confidence, no matter where their data lives.”
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