Snowflake’s Bala Kasiviswanathan: Your data doesn't need a new home. It needs context.

Bala Kasiviswanathan, VP of Developer and AI Experiences at Snowflake, joins ZeroPrime and AI Council Co-founder, Pete Soderling, to unpack the challenges enterprise data teams face as AI demands instant access to trusted data — and what it actually takes to solve them. Bala has spent his career building developer platforms through three waves of technological change: client-server to cloud, cloud to mobile, and now mobile to AI. At Snowflake, he leads the team behind Coco (Snowflake's AI coding agent) and is helping enterprise teams turn their ever-growing data into trusted, governed action. In this conversation, Pete and Bala discuss: - Why the challenge is not accessing data anymore, it’s about actioning data - Why governance and speed are no longer a tradeoff, and what changed architecturally to make that true - What happens when marketing, finance, and ops all build from the same governed context — with examples from WHOOP and Thomson Reuters - Why traditional engineers don't disappear in this shift — they move up the stack - When everyone has a builder mindset it unlocks organizational productivity Timestamps: 00:00 – Intro 00:48 – Bala's background and the opportunity at Snowflake 02:24 – What Bala is spending his time on right now 03:30 – You don't need all your data in one place — just the ability to access it 04:26 – The biggest manifestations of data silos in the enterprise 06:09 – Why data integration is still hard, even after all these years 08:11 – When teams don't want to share the same metrics definitions 13:01 – How Snowflake keeps context fresh and up to date 15:18 – Introducing Coco: turning context into action 21:26 – The governance vs. speed tradeoff — and why it's no longer real 24:08 – The power of being a builder, expanded across teams 26:40 – Guardrails and accountability when thousands of people are building 28:58 – What's changed: the fear of moving too slow vs. too early 32:05 – What the data team looks like five years from now 34:13 – When everyone has a builder mindset it unlocks organizational productivity ZeroPrime is a podcast from Zero Prime Ventures that explores the early stories of top startups through the lens of their engineer founders. 👉 Sign up for our "No BS" Newsletter to get the latest technical data & AI content: https://aicouncil.com/newsletter ABOUT AI COUNCIL: AI Council brings together the brightest minds in data to share industry knowledge, technical architectures and best practices in building cutting edge data & AI systems and tools. FIND US: Website: https://aicouncil.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/aicouncilconf/ X: https://x.com/aicouncilconf