Sridhar Ramaswamy

Sridhar Ramaswamy (born 1967) is an Indian-American technologist who spent fifteen years at Google, rising to senior vice president of advertising and commerce — the division behind most of Google’s revenue. In 2019 he left to co-found Neeva, an ad-free, subscription-based search engine that leaned heavily on large language models. Snowflake acquired Neeva in 2023, and in February 2024 Ramaswamy was installed as CEO with an explicit mandate: turn the data-warehouse giant into an AI company.

Enterprise AI without the hype

Under Ramaswamy, Snowflake shipped Cortex AI, a suite that lets customers run LLMs directly against their enterprise data, and built its own foundation model, Arctic. His public message is distinctive among AI-boom CEOs: relentless enthusiasm paired with impatience for theater. He told Semafor in 2025 that too many executives are “shopping for AI” like consumers chasing a dopamine hit, and that AI is a means to an end that does not automatically create business value. In a LinkedIn predictions post he called 2025 an “adapt or die” year for organizations that fail to integrate AI thoughtfully.

He has also argued the disruption runs deeper than tooling — telling interviewers that AI is turning every company into a software company and that much of traditional application software risks being reduced to plumbing beneath AI agents. Critics note the self-interest: every one of those predictions routes more workloads onto Snowflake. But his adoption advice — start with simple applications that show real value — has made him one of the more credible voices on what enterprise AI actually looks like in practice.