#36 - Snowflake’s AI push counters SaaSpocalypse fears - Baris Gultekin

Snowflake has been a stalwart of the SaaS economy and a leader in enterprise data for the past decade. But the company is deep in the middle of a transformation that most people haven't recognized yet.In this episode of The Deep View Conversations, senior reporter Nat Rubio-Licht talks with Baris Gultekin, vice president of AI at Snowflake, for a candid look at how the company is navigating the AI era and what it's learning in real time.Gultekin talks openly about how the entire team inside Snowflake is now using coding tools to build skills and automate their work. That includes non-developers who are using Project SnowWork, an AI agent for professionals across all roles.Baris joined Snowflake in 2023 through the acquisition of blockchain startup nxyz and has spent the past three years building and running the AI teams inside the enterprise tech giant. He also brings a rare perspective from his time working on Google Assistant in the pre-LLM era, which gives him a unique lens on how much has changed.Topics covered:+ Why there is no AI strategy without a data strategy, and what enterprises keep getting wrong+ How agentic AI has shifted enterprise data from question-answering to automation+ The SaaSpocalypse and why Snowflake sees AI as a tailwind rather than a threat+ Cortex Code (CoCo), Snowflake's coding agent that lets customers query their data in plain language instead of SQL+ The governance and security challenges that come with multi-agent systems+ How Baris uses coding agents in his own lifeIf you want to understand how a mature SaaS company reinvents itself inside an AI revolution, this one is worth your time.Subscribe to the podcast for more conversations with the leaders, builders, and researchers shaping the future of AI.And don't forget to sign up for The Deep View daily newsletter. We don’t just cover AI, we decode it. In a world flooded with hype, we deliver sharp, no-nonsense insights to keep you ahead of the curve and help you put AI to work every day: subscribe.thedeepview.com