Snowflake CEO warns software could become a 'dumb data pipe' to AI

Snowflake's chief executive warned that the biggest software companies risk being reduced to mere data sources for large AI models. "The big model makers want to create a world in which all of the data for all of the enterprises is easily available to them," Sridhar Ramaswamy said on an episode of Alex Kantrowitz's "Big Technology Podcast." "Everything else, the world, is just a dumb data pipe that feeds into that big brain." Ramaswamy, who became Snowflake's CEO in 2024 after serving as a partner at Greylock Ventures and cofounded AI search startup Neeva (later acquired by Snowflake), said the company must operate with a "fear" that customers might abandon AI agents built by software firms in favor of an all-inclusive agent that pulls data from Snowflake and elsewhere.

His proposed remedy is simple: let customers decide how they want to access their data — through their own agents or via products like ChatGPT. He noted a recent shift in the market as AI labs moved from providing infrastructure to offering software themselves.

snowflake, sridhar ramaswamy, large models, ai agents, data pipe, chatgpt, neeva, greylock ventures, enterprise data, software companies