Snowflake VP of AI Baris Gultekin on Bringing AI to Data, Agent Design, Text-2-SQL, RAG & More

Hello, and welcome back to the cognitive revolution. Before we get started today, a quick final reminder. If you dream of a career in AI safety research, the deadline to apply to MAT's summer twenty twenty six program is January 18. Listen to my recent episode with MAT's executive director Ryan Kidd for all of the reasons that you should consider applying, and then get started at mattsprogram.org/tcr. Today, my guest is Barish Gultekin, vice president of AI at Snowflake, the cloud based data platform that now describes itself as the AI data cloud. Barish came to Snowflake along with Snowflake's current CEO, Sridhar Ramaswamy, as part of Neva, an AI powered web and personal knowledge base search engine that Snowflake acquired in May 2023. Since then, he's been working at the intersection of frontier AI capabilities and hard enterprise realities, deploying these systems in environments where security, governance, and reliability are strict requirements. As you'll hear, Snowflake's core philosophy is to bring AI to the data rather than sending sensitive data out to model providers. And in this episode, we unpack exactly what that looks like in practice. We cover a ton of ground, including the massive ongoing unlock of unstructured data, which is making the 80 to 90% of enterprise information that was previously trapped in PDFs and other documents queryable for the very first time. The current state of both Text to SQL and RAG systems and why reasoning models have finally made natural language data analysis reliable enough for business users, the trade offs between using frontier models versus smaller specialized models and when to use structured workflows versus letting models choose their own adventures, how data residency requirements are shaping partnerships between cloud providers, model labs, and platforms like Snowflake, how AI coding assistants are changing the discipline of product management by enabling rapid prototyping of working features, where Barish sees value accruing in the AI stack and his prediction that horizontal applications will win out over narrower vertical solutions, and finally, why Barish takes the over on my timeline for autonomous drop in knowledge workers and what he believes will have to happen first. If you want to understand how large enterprise companies are deploying AI today and what's really working as they mature from the early experimentation phase to the ROI at scale phase, taking all of the operational complexities and security and governance concerns into account, I think this conversation will be perfect for you. And with that, I hope you enjoy this deep dive into enterprise AI adoption and the future of data intelligence with Berish Gultekin, vice president of AI at Snowflake. Berish Gultekin, vice president of AI at Snowflake. Welcome to the Cognitive Revolution. Thank you, Nathan. Thanks for having me. I'm excited for this conversation. There's gonna be a lot to learn. I think people we have a very diverse audience. The number one profile is AI engineer. And within that profile, people work at a lot of …