Bringing AI to Data: Agent Design, Text-2-SQL, RAG, & more, w- Snowflake VP of AI Baris Gultekin

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 MATS Summer 2026 program is January 18th. Listen to my recent episode with MATS executive director Ryan Kidd for all the reasons you should apply, and get started at MATSprogram.org/TCR

Today my guest is Baris Gultekin, Vice President of AI at Snowflake, the cloud-based data platform that now describes itself as the AI Data Cloud.

Baris came to Snowflake, along with Snowflake's current CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, as part of Neeva, an AI-powered web & 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 80-90% of enterprise information previously trapped in PDFs and other documents queryable for the 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 adventure
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 Baris sees value accruing in the AI stack, and his prediction that horizontal application layers will win out over narrower vertical solutions
And finally why Baris 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 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 Baris Gultekin, Vice President of AI @ Snowflake.

Watch now!

Thank you for being part of The Cognitive Revolution,
Nathan Labenz