Descriptions:
Baris Gultekin, Vice President of AI at Snowflake, joins the Cognitive Revolution to discuss how one of the world’s largest data platforms is moving enterprise customers from early AI experimentation into measurable ROI at scale. Gultekin came to Snowflake via the 2023 acquisition of Neeva, an AI-powered search engine, and has since been working at the intersection of frontier AI capabilities and hard enterprise realities — security, data governance, and regulatory compliance included.
At the center of Snowflake’s strategy is a philosophy of bringing AI to the data rather than the reverse. Because enterprise customers have invested heavily in centralizing sensitive data on Snowflake, they are unwilling to replicate it across external model providers. Gultekin explains how this architecture is finally unlocking the 80-90% of enterprise information previously trapped in PDFs and unstructured documents, making it queryable for the first time. He argues that reasoning models were the critical enabler that made text-to-SQL and RAG systems reliable enough for non-technical business users — a threshold that earlier model generations consistently failed to clear.
The conversation also covers how Snowflake thinks about model commoditization and helping customers stay agile as new models arrive, the trade-offs between frontier and specialized models for different tasks, why Gultekin predicts horizontal AI applications will outperform narrow vertical ones, and how AI coding assistants have fundamentally changed the product management discipline by enabling rapid prototyping. He closes by explaining why he takes the optimistic side of debates about when autonomous AI knowledge workers will become practical — and what needs to happen first.
📺 Source: Cognitive Revolution “How AI Changes Everything” · Published January 14, 2026
🏷️ Format: Interview
