Snowflake VP of AI on Why Enterprises Hide Behind Governance to Avoid Real AI Transformation | Baris Gultekin | E296

Snowflake is the AI Data Cloud behind some of the world's largest enterprises — $4.68 billion in annual revenue, 29% year-over-year growth, and over 760 Forbes Global 2000 companies as customers. Baris Gultekin, VP of AI at Snowflake, leads the product efforts that sit at the center of how those enterprises actually operationalize AI. Before Snowflake, he co-founded Google Assistant and scaled it from 10 million to 500 million monthly users.

What you'll learn:

• Why our data isn't clean enough is a delay tactic — and the scoped approach to move past it

• What the semantic layer is and how it lets AI answer business questions accurately, not just fluently

• Why running AI next to data (instead of sending data to models) makes governance dramatically easier

• How Snowflake deployed AI internally: a CEO-level non-optional mandate combined with bottom-up access to their own Cortex coding agent

• Why context — not just data — is what agents need to operate reliably at enterprise scale

Key takeaways:

• Start with one scoped use case, build the semantic model around it, layer governance — don't wait for perfect data

• Context is a shared reality for agents: unified data + business semantics + codified workflows

• AI adoption compounds when leadership sets a hard mandate and simultaneously gives everyone a tool to experiment with

Credits:
Host: Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia
Guest: Baris Gultekin

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