Agentic AI is being misread as a series of separate battles - e.g. Snowflake vs. Databricks, copilots vs. agents, model makers vs. app vendors, etc. We think the real story is that the biggest opportunity in software is converging around who owns the new intelligent client and the AI back end that makes it useful. The new client is the agent-based system of engagement - Snowflake’s CoWork & CoCo, Databricks Genie, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini Enterprise, ChatGPT/Codex, Claude/Cowork and others. But that client cannot deliver business outcomes without a new back end - what we call a System of Intelligence - that represents a model of the enterprise in terms of its business rules and tacit knowledge. You can’t build one without the other. We frame this premise using Clay Christensen’s integrated innovation and Jensen’s extreme co-design as applied to enterprise software.
That is why Snowflake is the focal point for this Breaking Analysis, but not the whole story. Snowflake is not just competing with Databricks anymore. It is now in the same strategic arena as Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Celonis and others - all trying to define where business users, builders and agents get work done, and where the enterprise context that powers that work gets built.

Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante and George Gilbert

Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante

Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante and George Gilbert

The agentic era is forcing a reset in enterprise architecture. Agents taking action go far beyond just analyzing data living in lakehouses. Agents acting on behalf of humans, continuously, at machine scale bring new architectural requirements to the enterprise. The so-called “modern data stack” as most organizations know it, has become a sort of “new legacy.” No longer can organizations rely on stitched-together systems, fragmented governance, batch pipelines, and historical security boundaries. As we move from human-scale dashboards to agent-scale execution, fragmentation becomes an operational and compliance risk.
This is where we believe Google has an underappreciated advantage. Our research indicates the winning architectures in the agentic era will be the ones that operate as a coherent, end-to-end system — where the model, the cognitive engine, and the infrastructure are tightly integrated and share a single trusted boundary, consistent security controls, and an efficient cost structure that can generate tokens in volume but doesn’t collapse under thousands of agent interactions per minute. This is the premise behind our Google thesis. We believe Google is in a strong position to build on decades of infrastructure and data excellence and push toward an AI powered cloud that goes beyond a reactive system of intelligence to one that takes action at scale. Essentially we see Google as one of the companies best positioned to execute on our vision of delivering a real-time digital representation of an enterprise. One that blends the power of generative AI with trusted and consistent determinism to deliver real time actions that leverage both structured and unstructured and can execute transactions as scale. 

Geopolitical dislocations are ripping through the stock market and are filtering down to IT budgets in the form of increased uncertainty. It seems that every quarter of budget optimism is followed with some external event that causes organizations to tighten their belts. Specifically, we’ve seen the increased momentum in January CIO sentiment on spending, pull back as war, oil prices, the threat of inflation and even the prospect of Fed tightening now loom larger. While big tech players continue to spend massively on CAPEX, and the genuine enthusiasm from this month’s Nvidia GTC and RSAC events is still being felt, mainstream enterprises are once again expressing caution in their spending intentions. In addition to economic and world affairs, AI success still eludes most mainstream organizations. Our observation is the tech industry is in the third inning of the AI wave, which started in earnest mid last decade with Deep Mind and other significant research milestones that led to the ChatGPT and subsequent moments like Claude Code and OpenClaw. Yet organizations are still in the first inning. The data suggests that while virtually all firms are leaning into AI, those realizing ROI at scale remain the minority. While leading thinkers like Jensen Huang advise not focusing on ROI and letting innovation flourish irrespective of hard dollar returns, the reality is in the land of enterprise customers, tangible returns and risk management remain key governors of spending. 

We know that RSAC 2026 will be an AI-heavy show. While we are going to hear the “AI will change everything” narrative, our premise is that security leaders are being asked to operationalize AI in an environment where complexity is rising faster than control. Organizations are still struggling to consolidate the sprawl of tools in their security stacks, and at the same time apply zero trust principles. To avoid AI becoming yet another layer, organizations must tie AI to clear outcomes and integrate intelligence into operating processes.

Dave Vellante is joined by John Furrier from theCUBE's set at MWC 26 Barcelona
in Barcelona, Spain for this weeks Breaking Analysis