While much of the buzz about AI today revolves around flashy copilots and productivity hacks, the reality for most data scientists and data engineering teams remains far less glamorous. Even in 2025, they still spend much of their time on the most tedious part of the job: cleaning and preparing data, i.e., dealing with missing values, duplicates, and inconsistencies.
But Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy wants to change that—not by replacing the people doing the work, but by eliminating the friction that slows them down, such as the endless cycles of reactive reporting. His bold bet is on agentic AI: autonomous model instances that can ingest data, reason over it, and make real-time decisions with minimal human engineering input.
“Until now, AI tools have been excellent at one-step tasks: You ask a question, you get an answer; you ask for code, you get a snippet. They are powerful assistants, but they require constant direction,” Ramaswamy tells Fast Company. “In the enterprise [space], agentic AI means goal-directed autonomy.”
From Data Silos to Conversational Insight
Ramaswamy, a former head of Google Ads, Greylock partner, and CEO of search startup Neeva, took the reins at Snowflake in February 2024 after it acquired Neeva. He brought deep AI and search expertise, quickly realigning the company’s go-to-market strategy and accelerating AI talent infusion through acquisitions like Crunchy Data, Samooha, and Datavolo. As a result, Snowflake reported its first billion-dollar quarter in May 2025, marking a 26% year-over-year increase.
