316 | Breaking Analysis | Personal Agents Light the Fuse as Snowflake and Databricks Move Up the AI Stack - co authored w/ George Gilbert This week on Breaking Analysis, George Gilbert and I unpacked why the next phase of enterprise AI may look a lot like the PC era at first - bottom-up, personal, productivity-driven and often self-funded. But there’s one major difference that stands out... PCs helped people create documents, spreadsheets and dashboards. Agents act. If every individual, department and vendor builds its own island of intelligence, enterprises will recreate the same silo problem that has plagued software for decades - only faster, with greater risk. Our premise is that the first wave of enterprise AI will be driven by personal agents, but the durable value will accrue to the platforms that organize enterprise knowledge into a true System of Intelligence. That’s why Snowflake and Databricks remain relevant ahead of their respective summits. They’ve crossed the Rubicon. They are no longer just data platforms serving analytics. They’re moving up the AI stack toward the layer where enterprise data, rules, context, actions and business logic become human-readable, agent-readable and eventually executable. And they’re not alone. Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft, Palantir Technologies, Celonis, Oracle, Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others are all moving toward some version of this control point. The key idea is this: How sophisticated your data model is determines how sophisticated your analytics can be. And how sophisticated your analytics are determines how much action your agents can safely take on your behalf. That is the battle for data intelligence. Personal agents light the fuse. The System of Intelligence determines who captures the value. Full Breaking Analysis in comments. #AI #AgenticAI #Snowflake #Databricks #DataIntelligence #EnterpriseAI #SystemOfIntelligence #DataPlatforms #DigitalTwin #CIO #ChiefAIOfficer #theCUBEResearch
David Vellante George Gilbert - This research gets tighter with each Breaking Analysis post. The System of Intelligence is the deterministic heart of the enterprise operating system. While models and their guardrails will improve incrementally, the big Agentic AI gains going forward will come from the Systems of Intelligence layer providing a Semantic AI Harness (Gateway + Ontology + Workflows + Tools + Governance). Capability-wise, EnterpriseWeb is way out in front enabling the North Star - "a real-time digital representation of the business, or an enterprise digital twin" (https://medium.com/@daveduggal/enterpriseweb-is-the-ultimate-backend-for-ai-cff947417d8a). Our collaboration with Snowflake (https://enterpriseweb.com/eweb-collab-with-snowflake/) demonstrates how we operationalize data in AI Data Cloud. We dynamically orchestrate Snowflake's data, analytic and AI services using our ontology rewrite prompts and generate queries, enrich and validate inferences, and optimize and control agent behavior for enterprise-grade contextual automation. Beyond accuracy and safety, we've demonstrated that Ontologies can enable low-token, low-latency, energy efficient, which is critical to realizing an ROI from GenAI.
What stood out to me is the observation that personal agents are increasingly emerging from the bottom up rather than through formal enterprise transformation programs. That feels very similar to the early PC era, except agents don't just create content, they can increasingly take action. The opportunity is enormous, but so is the challenge. Historically, organizations struggled with information silos. It will be interesting to see whether the next phase of enterprise AI becomes less about building more agents and more about creating shared operational context so those agents can act in alignment with business objectives, governance requirements, and customer outcomes. The phrase "System of Intelligence" is an interesting way to frame that challenge.
Read the full research note: https://thecuberesearch.com/316-breaking-analysis-personal-agents-light-the-fuse-as-snowflake-and-databricks-move-up-the-ai-stack/