Snowflake Tells London Audience the Agentic Enterprise Era Is Already in Production

Speaking at the keynote, James Hall, Snowflake's Country Manager for the UK and Ireland, said data work has to come first. "There's no enterprise AI strategy without a data strategy," Hall told the audience, adding that companies need a data foundation that is "trusted, governed, secure and accessible." He said the past 12 months had taken the industry "from talking about the potential of AI to putting AI to work," and framed the current phase as "making AI real for business as we enter the era of the agentic enterprise."

Hall pointed to UK and Ireland customers including the mobile operator GiffGaff as evidence, and Snowflake chief executive Sridhar Ramaswamy later appeared on stage alongside the chief executive of London Stock Exchange Group.

Christian Kleinerman, Snowflake's Executive Vice President of Product Management, then laid out the company's definition of the term. An agentic enterprise, he said, is an organization that has embedded AI-powered agents into its core operating processes, coordinating with humans, setting directions and guardrails, and automating as much as possible, with the aim of making workers more productive and producing better business outcomes.

Kleinerman said the promise of AI is "unparalleled" among the technologies of his lifetime, and used the stage to push back on what he described as a growing myth: that AI is capable enough on its own that data will sort itself out. "But if anything, the opposite is true," he said, arguing that the most impressive results come from having a great data strategy.

He identified three elements that feed into what Snowflake calls an "agentic control plane": an AI model, data context, and software and applications. On model selection, Kleinerman said the company is "committed to model choice for all of you," noting that there is no clear way to know which AI models will prevail even within the next few months.

Data context, he added, is becoming increasingly important because understanding a specific business shapes how AI can help it. "The truly amazing results come when you really understand your data," he said. "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."

The third element, software and apps, is what allows AI to integrate with the rest of a company's infrastructure. Kleinerman described the agentic control plane as "the glue that holds all this together," and said an agentic enterprise "truly comes to life when the AI models can interoperate with the rest of your enterprise infrastructure." He said the goal is to keep accelerating, so that customers experience "an avalanche of innovation."

Hall closed the keynote with a warning about pacing. "We're operating in a fast-moving environment, arguably the biggest risk any business could take right now is by standing still," he said. "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." He added: "The era of the agentic enterprise isn't coming, it's here - it's happening right now in production."

The comments, reported by TechRadar from the London event, position Snowflake's pitch around data governance and interoperability rather than a single model or product, at a time when enterprise buyers are being asked to move AI agents from pilot projects into day-to-day operations.