The following is a conversation between Alp Uguray and Baris Gultekin.

Guest Bio

Baris Gultekin is Vice President of AI at Snowflake, where he leads the Cortex AI product portfolio and drives the company's AI product roadmap and strategy. He built Snowflake's AI product suite from the ground up after joining in 2023 through the acquisition of nxyz, the blockchain data infrastructure company he co-founded and served as CEO, backed by Paradigm, Sequoia, and Greylock. Previously, Baris spent 16 years at Google, where he co-created Google Now and served as Product Director for Google Assistant, growing it from 10M to 500M monthly users. He holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University and an MBA from Stanford GSB.

Takeaways

The Google Assistant era taught a hard lesson: when AI feels natural but fails on most use cases, trust breaks down completely.

"Bring AI to the data" isn't just a security play — it enables governance inheritance, semantic understanding, and dramatically simpler architectures.

There is no AI strategy without a data strategy: break down silos, bring business semantics onto the platform, then build agents.

Skills — modular instructions and scripts that agents load on-demand — are the most exciting frontier in enterprise AI, creating an exponentially expanding surface of capabilities.

Enterprise platforms like Salesforce, SAP, and Workday won't disappear, but the majority of interactions will shift from humans to agents.

Agent-to-agent protocols like MCP are unlocking real-time data access across silos — and natural language makes adoption faster than any prior protocol shift.

Trust is the gating factor for autonomy: low-stakes automations already run without humans; high-stakes cases still need oversight, but what took weeks now takes minutes.

We're in the terminal era of AI UX — visual, voice, and multi-modal interfaces are about to transform how we interact with intelligence.

The economics of intelligence are democratizing: the pie is growing so fast it's lifting all boats rather than creating a tug of war between platforms.

Startup advice from someone who's done it: the best founders solve problems they feel passionately about — people who build successful products are ones who cannot not do it.

Chapters

00:00 Walking away from Google after 16 years to start nxyz

03:01 From Google Now to Google Assistant: why the technology wasn't ready

05:24 Bring AI to the data: Snowflake's core architecture thesis

08:34 The application layer evolves: agents, SaaS, and natural language interfaces

11:27 Agent-to-agent protocols: MCP, commerce, and the agentic web

13:25 The Matrix moment: skills as the breakthrough for enterprise agents

15:48 Hyper-personalization and the rise of internal tools

16:21 We're back to the terminal: why AI UX is about to change everything

18:57 The oracle problem: source of truth when agents negotiate

21:15 The economics of intelligence: NVIDIA, the AI stack, and a growing pie

24:57 Jobs, education, healthcare: how intelligence reshapes every industry

27:18 Sci-fi became real: how Baris's kids use AI to learn

30:22 Aligning enterprise AI: accountability, guardrails, and scoped agents

34:00 Healthcare data: regulation, fragmentation, and a weekend project with Claude computer use

37:07 Reactive vs. autonomous agents: why trust is the bottleneck

40:24 How Cortex AI changes the data layer: MCP, semantic models, and real-time insights

44:14 No AI strategy without a data strategy: the ontology of enterprise knowledge

46:50 Startup advice: passion, depth, and the burning desire to build

49:19 Snowflake's partner ecosystem: why data access is the biggest startup unlock

53:16 General intelligence: what we overestimate, underestimate, and why tools matter most

Quotes

"These agents, it's like in The Matrix — 'I want to know karate' and I know karate. Being able to tap into these skills expands the surface on which you can take action." — Baris Gultekin, VP of AI at Snowflake

"There is no AI strategy without a data strategy." — Baris Gultekin, VP of AI at Snowflake

"When you make something more natural, there are expectations of human-like intelligence. When it works in a couple of your use cases but not most, that expectation breaks down. That was the biggest challenge with the Google Assistant era." — Baris Gultekin, VP of AI at Snowflake

"The pie is growing so much that it is not a fixed pie we need to protect. The tide is rising all boats." — Baris Gultekin, VP of AI at Snowflake

"People who build successful products are ones that cannot not do it. There is this burning desire to go make it happen." — Baris Gultekin, VP of AI at Snowflake

Episode ID: 1000750139385

GUID: 614cae1e753a0223e04b08a9:615252b4f0e89b073f1e682d:69866e636e4a8f07b2237258

Release Date: 17/02/2026, 16:30:10