On the 29th episode of Enterprise Software Innovators, hosts Evan Reiser (Abnormal Security) and Saam Motamedi (Greylock Partners) talk with Bob Muglia, former CEO at Snowflake and former President at Microsoft. ​​For over 30 years, Bob has been at the frontier of modern technology and spent over two decades at Microsoft, becoming one of four Presidents reporting directly to CEO Steve Ballmer. After a stint at Juniper Networks, he was CEO of Snowflake, a foundational cloud data company, and today sits on the boards of several technology startups. In this conversation, Bob discusses navigating AI as an enterprise business, the role of data in AI’s success, and valuable lessons on innovative leadership.

Quick hits from Bob:

On exciting trends emerging in AI: “Probably the most incredible thing that's happened this year, ‘what is the programming language of 2023?’ English. English is the new programming language, which is a crazy thing to think about. Now, you’re basically programming these AI models by talking to it in English, and pretty soon they'll be multimodal and you'll just literally be talking to them. So it's making things much more accessible.

On the importance of data quality relating to AI: “AI only knows as much as the data that it is trained on or fed with. It has to be provided with data in order to provide answers. If you can't come up with that data in a coherent way, you are not going to be able to use these models very effectively.”

On ethics being present in AI driven products: “I encourage every company that I work with to create a set of values and to really live by those values and to demonstrate that in many deep ways throughout the organization. That's something I focused on throughout my career. One of the observations I've had is that in the technology space, the values of a company are reflected in their products. This is only going to become reinforced and more true as AI takes on more and more decision making capability within these products.”

Recent Book Recommendations: 

• Robot Visions by Isaac Asimov
• The Datapreneurs by Bob Muglia

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Enterprise Software Innovators is a show where top tech executives share how they innovate at scale. Each episode covers unique insights and stories that will help you succeed as a technology leader. Find more great lessons from tech leaders and enterprise software experts at https://www.enterprisesoftware.blog/

Enterprise Software Innovators is produced by Luke Reiser and Josh Meer.