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. At Snowflake’s 2026 Summit he described running that experiment on his own staff, teaching engineers to work as “a tech lead of agents” and calling the shift a huge one.