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Baris Gultekin: recommendation

14 Jan 2026 The Cognitive Revolution Snowflake VP of AI Baris Gultekin on Bringing AI to Data, Agent Design, Text-2-SQL, RAG & More

“If you go build an agent, the person who asks the question can only get the answer that they're eligible to see and nothing else. This is super obvious and important, but because we have kind of these types of very granular access controls from the ground up as part of the core data platform.”

— Baris Gultekin

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Speaker
Baris Gultekin
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
recommendation
Recorded
14 Jan 2026
Publisher
The Cognitive Revolution

Transcript context

…One of the big things, huge theme, right, of the communications that I've seen from Snowflake in preparing for this is the importance of trust. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on what are the levels of What are the dimensions and what are the levels that we have to hit in order for an enterprise to trust an AI process? Yeah, I mean, just to reiterate, for us, trust is incredibly important. If I were to call out two important tenets, one is super ease of use. So how easy it is to build out these solutions and to use them. And of course, trust is at the core of everything. And trust spans multiple different dimensions, right? You know, trusting, from a security perspective, then from a governance perspective, then you have the quality layer on top of it. And then there is kind of evaluations and monitoring and so forth. So it's a full stack. So the way we think about this is by running AI next to data, A lot of the core governance that is put on the data is by design respected in our system. So what that means is, let's say you have sensitive data that's only visible by the HR team. If you go build an agent, the person who asks the question can only get the answer that they're eligible to see and nothing else. This is super obvious and important, but because we have kind of these types of very granular access controls from the ground up as part of the core data platform. Building agents that respect that becomes much easier to do. Then you have governance at various layers. And of course, next level is evaluations of these. So a lot of the trust is in, are you able to build high quality retrieval of context to pass to the agent? Is the agent orchestrator doing a great job figuring out which tool to use, which trajectory to use to answer the question? So evaluation is a core part of the platform, and then ongoing monitoring, getting feedback, and then that cycle of improving the quality. From a user perspective, the way that that trust manifests is when a user asks the question, we have UI elements that says, hey, you know, this question has an answer that was verified by an owner. So again, bringing that trust element into the user experience is another tenant to our philosophy. So did I catch correctly at the data governance level that the shorthand rule is like the agent can only access the same data that the user can access? And so in theory, that could mean like multiple users could come to the same agent and have different experiences because the agent has different data access based on the user that's using it at the time?…

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