As businesses everywhere continue to get to grips with the reality of AI-powered workflows, Snowflake has revealed its view of what it will take for a company to become a truly <a href="https://myappsplus.com/if-an-ai-agent-is-attesting-your-controls-whos-attesting-the-agent/” title=”If an AI agent is attesting your controls, who’s attesting the agent?”>agentic enterprise.
Speaking at the company’s Snowflake World Tour London event, senior leaders laid out how a number of factors will all contribute to agentic success.
The ‘Agentic Enterprise’ is here
“There’s no enterprise AI strategy without a data strategy,” declared James Hall, Snowflake Country Manager, UK&I as he kicked off the keynote.
“You need the right data foundation, trusted, governed, secure and accessible…in just 12 months, we’ve moved from talking about the potential of AI to putting AI to work…it’s now all about making AI real for business as we enter the era of the agentic enterprise.”
Hall highlighted the success of UK&I customers such as mobile operator GiffGaff, with Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy also later joined on stage by the CEO of the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) as proof of this.
But it was Christian Kleinerman, EVP Product Management, who took to the stage to run through the factors the company sees as vital for an agentic enterprise.
“We are all part of the era of the agentic enterprise,” he declared, defining this term as an organization that has been able to embed AI powered agents into its core operating processes, co-ordinating with humans, setting directions, setting guardrails and automating as much as possible – all with the ultimate goal of help workers be more productive, and creating better business outcomes.
“The promise of AI is unparalleled, in my mind, to other technologies that we’ve seen in our lifetime,” Kleinerman added, addressing a growing myth around the technology, namely that some organizations believe AI is so good and smart, the data will sort itself out.
“But if anything, the opposite is true,” Kleinerman said the most amazing results you can envisage with AI come from having a great data strategy.”
Kleinerman noted three main elements for an enterprise to be truly agentic – an AI model, data context, and software and apps – all feeding into what Snowflake calls an “agentic control plane”.
When it comes to picking a model, Kleinerman noted the company is “committed to model choice for all of you” – as there is clearly no way to know who will win out in AI models even within the next few months.
Data context is becoming increasingly crucial, he added, as understanding your business matters a lot to how AI can be beneficial for you, and having the right software and apps will really allow AI to integrate with the rest of your enterprise infrastructure.
“The truly amazing results come when you really understand your data”, he added, “we want to un-silo your data, we want to help you govern your data…so humans can be more data-driven – AI has supercharged that ability.”
All of this flows into the agentic control plane – “the glue that holds all this together”, Kleinerman concluded, “the agentic enterprise truly comes to life when the AI models can interoperate with the rest of your enterprise infrastructure…(and) hopefully it feels like an avalanche of innovation…our goal is to continue accelerating.”
“We’re operating in a fast-moving environment, arguably the biggest risk any business could take right now is by standing still – but moving fast with data and AI shouldn’t mean losing control, it means having the foundation, the flexibility and the confidence to move quickly,” Hill added.
“The era of the agentic enterprise isn’t coming, it’s here – it’s happening right now in production.”
