Big Technology Podcast · Alex Kantrowitz

Who’s Winning The AI Race? + Software’s Future — With Sridhar Ramaswamy

·58 min·3 clips

Snowflake says its agent platform already has over 2,000 customers three months after GA.

1. Big Technology Podcast with Sridhar Ramaswamy centers on the AI race and the future of software work. 2. Alex Kantrowitz hosts, and Sridhar Ramaswamy is Snowflake’s CEO, a former Google SVP of ads and commerce, and a returning guest. 3. The episode asks whether OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and Gemini are changing the balance of power, and whether AI agents are real business tools. 4. Ramaswamy says the AI race changes every month and that a one-year lead can disappear quickly. 5. He says the gap between OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, and everyone else is “quite staggering,” which keeps incumbents from feeling safe. 6. Kantrowitz cites web-visit growth data showing OpenAI up 50% and Google up 647% from January 2025 to January 2026. 7. Ramaswamy says OpenAI has become “the Google of choice” for chat, but he also points to Google’s Nano Banana image generation as a serious competitive response. 8. He says Google’s DeepMind separation, distribution, and TPU investments now act as accelerants because the company already achieved the breakthrough. 9. He recalls Google operating in crisis mode during live.com, Google Plus, and Code Red moments to show how fast big companies can respond. 10. He frames OpenAI’s expansion into consumer chat, video, devices, and enterprise as a question of focus, not just ambition. 11. Ramaswamy says judgments about focus are often post-fact and depend on outcomes rather than strategy. 12. He says Snowflake and OpenAI have a $200 million partnership and many joint customers, which makes enterprise collaboration practical. 13. He says Snowflake Intelligence reached over 2,000 customers about three months after GA, which he calls one of Snowflake’s fastest-growing products. 14. He gives a manufacturer example with five million SKUs and says an agentic pricing system could unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. 15. He describes future work as asking systems to watch revenue alerts, email, documents, and even the stock market, then return a brief and recommendations. 16. He says Snowflake’s support team has moved from 50 software writers and 300 software users to a builder-user model using Cortex Code and tools that can be extended. 17. Ramaswamy says the support workflow has produced 10x reductions in time to debug complex cases and a histogram of warehouse resume times from one prompt. 18. The interview style is direct and product-heavy, with Alex pressing on market data, software valuation, and platform risk while Ramaswamy answers in long examples. 19. People tracking AI competition, enterprise software, and data-platform strategy will get the most from it. 20. Listeners wanting a narrative story or consumer AI hype may skip it.

As heard by us

A grounded AI race conversation that turns agentic software into a practical warehouse-resume-time test.

Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy gives the AI race a grounded check, linking agentic software to the tools, setup, and guardrails that make it useful inside a company.

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Why you'd press play

Want to test whether AI agents feel real in practice? Start with a warehouse resume-times histogram made in about 10 seconds.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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