"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis Snowflake VP of AI Baris Gultekin on Bringing AI to Data, Agent Design, Text-2-SQL, RAG & More
237 snips
Jan 14, 2026 
Baris Gultekin, Vice President of AI at Snowflake, leads the charge in integrating AI with enterprise data while ensuring security and governance. He discusses the evolution from structured analytics to unlocking unstructured data, making AI more accessible without analysts. Baris highlights advancements in text-to-SQL, emphasizes the importance of embedding quality for RAG, and predicts that agents will enhance productivity in product development. His insights on open standards and model choices illuminate the future of AI in transforming data analytics.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Bring AI To The Data
- Snowflake positions itself as an "AI data cloud" that brings AI to data rather than moving data to models.
- Baris Gultekin argues this reduces replication, preserves governance, and shrinks attack surface for enterprises.
Unstructured Data Unlocks New Value
- Unstructured data (80–90%) is being unlocked by AI via extraction and vector search, making it analyzable at scale.
- Combining structured and newly-structured unstructured data enables richer real-world applications like wealth management agents.
Text‑To‑SQL Has Crossed A Quality Threshold
- Text-to-SQL improved as reasoning models and semantic layers matured, making enterprise deployment feasible.
- Snowflake Intelligence is presented as a product enabling business users to query governed data in natural language.