Snowflake VP of AI Baris Gultekin: No AI Strategy Without a Data Strategy & Why Skills Are the New Apps

Snowflake VP of AI Baris Gultekin: No AI Strategy Without a Data Strategy & Why Skills Are the New Apps · Masters of Automation

The assistant era taught a hard lesson: when you make AI feel natural, users expect human-like intelligence — and when it 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 of business logic, and dramatically simpler architectures for enterprise AI.
There is no AI strategy without a data strategy: companies must break down data silos, bring business semantics onto their data platform, and make their knowledge base AI-accessible before building agents.
Skills are the new frontier: modular instructions and scripts that agents can load on-demand create an exponentially expanding surface of capabilities — from drafting marketing campaigns to pulling contract data.
The SaaS stack won't disappear, but the interface will: enterprise platforms like Salesforce and SAP will evolve so that majority of interactions are driven by agents rather than humans — changing UIs, not eliminating vendors.
Agent-to-agent protocols are emerging fast: MCP for context retrieval and new commerce/negotiation protocols will enable agents to transact across systems — and natural language makes adoption faster than prior protocol shifts.
Trust is the gating factor for autonomy: low-stakes automations are already running without humans in the loop; high-stakes cases still need oversight, but what once took weeks now takes minutes.
We're in the terminal era of AI UX: today's text-based interactions are the command line of the AI age — visual, voice, and multi-modal interfaces will rapidly evolve to match how humans naturally process information.
The economics of intelligence are democratizing: both data access (via natural language) and intelligence (via cheaper, better models) are being democratized — and the pie is growing so fast it's lifting all boats.
Startup advice hasn't changed: the best founders solve problems they feel passionately about and deeply understand — not problems they identified through market analysis.

Snowflake VP of AI Baris Gultekin: No AI Strategy Without a Data Strategy & Why Skills Are the New Apps

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