At Snowflake World Tour London, the theme of the agentic enterprise was front and center – with AI tools revolutionizing how businesses of all sizes work and operate.
But with worrying headlines around AI capabilities emerging on a regular basis, how do you ensure your own business can remain a trusted partner?
To find out more about what will really go into building a trusted agentic enterprise, I spoke to Mayank Uphadyay, Snowflake Chief Security & Trust Officer.
“Rock solid”
“This year has been so much about figuring out how to govern AI,” Uphadyay tells me, “there’s two sides to the coin – on the one side, you have to make sure that somebody else’s AI doesn’t break into your perimeter, and the other is how do you make sure your AI is well behaved, so not only does it not exfiltrate data, but it also doesn’t inadvertently go somewhere or break out of its perimeter.”
“When people trust us with their data, we need to make sure our platform is absolutely secure against agentic attacks.”
Uphadyay echoes the earlier Snowflake World Tour London keynote in what needs to go into making a successful agentic enterprise, likening the choice of AI model to the human brain and the agent being used as the body, all working on a foundation of data, which needs to be “rock solid”.
I ask Uphadyay how Snowflake can balance customer excitement around AI with the need to ensure trust and privacy.
He notes that the company’s customers are at different parts of the AI adoption spectrum – but the big difference is that security is “now the enabler, no longer the blocker”. Quoting former race driver Mario Andretti, Uphadyay adds that when driving, although you associate pressing the brakes with going slow, doing so will also give you confidence and trust when turning – and without them, you’d be driving really slowly anyways.
“That’s exactly how I see security – it what helps you build that trust, so I tell customers, leave it to us to give you the right guardrails, and the right controls – we’ll explain to you how it works.”
This is largely through the company’s Trust Center tool, running between the three layers Uphadyay mentioned, connecting them and protecting the customer, whilst also providing visibility into your system, and what improvements might be needed.
Snowflake has also been running for over 12 years, he adds, a reputation which has provided customers with trust.
Uphadyay also notes there is “a lot of innovation” happening in building and establishing new guardrails. He notes that as people work at a company for long periods of time, they acquire permissions for different systems and services they may no longer need – which can be an issue when they run an agent as themselves.
Ensuring and providing the right set of permissions for AI agents, which are exploratory in their nature, can go a long way to making sure issues never arise, and data remains secure.
When it comes to Snowflake’s own products, we were given a demo of its Coco and CoWork platforms at World Tour London, and Uphadyay is keen to describe how services like this will benefit companies moving forwards.
“It can be a combination of stuff that a human being is going to do, and along with automation, what you might normally do that was repetitive, you can easily imagine an AI to automate than for you,” he says.
“And what’s interesting is that it’s not deterministic any more – and there are all these points where you’re going to have to string all this automation together, and you need a human being to check…it’s a bit like a pyramid, if you think about a huge base of extremely mundane work, and then there’s a layer above that which is maybe less mundane, and so on – and then you get to the top, which is extremely mission critical, and you need a human being for sure.
“In this pyramid, you could say you want to automate, you want to move up, the more confidence you build, the higher you go – and that’s how enterprises build this confidence.”
“Things are here, things are real – it’s here and now.”
