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

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Mar 30, 2026

Baris Gultekin, VP of AI at Snowflake and former blockchain founder, explains how Snowflake is shifting into AI-driven automation. He discusses agentic AI replacing simple Q&A, why data strategy must come first, and how tools like Cortex Code and SnowWork let non-developers query and automate workflows in plain language.

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ADVICE

Clean And Govern Data To Unlock AI Use Cases

Invest in cleaning and governing data now to accelerate AI use cases and avoid being restricted to limited, low-value experiments.
Baris warns poor data hygiene forces narrow AI access and caps what companies can automate or analyze.

INSIGHT

Three Near Term AI Shifts In BI Work And Agents

Short-term BI, workflows, and autonomous agents form three pillars of near-term AI impact: faster insights, automated work, and persistent agents monitoring on behalf of users.
Baris expects autonomous agents that run regularly and notify users will grow in the next year.

INSIGHT

Multi-Agent Systems Need Shared Reality To Prevent Hallucinations

The biggest enterprise risk is multi-agent coordination and shared reality; governed data ensures agents avoid hallucinations and access only appropriate information.
Baris highlights the need for agent-agent guardrails and a common governed context to secure multi-agent systems.

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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 life

If you want to understand how a mature SaaS company reinvents itself inside an AI revolution, this one is worth your time.

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