Ep 38: Snowflake’s Bala Kasiviswanathan: Your data doesn’t need a new home. It needs new context.

What's actually stopping enterprises from putting their AI to work? Bala Kasiviswanathan, who oversees Snowflake CoCo, Snowflake's AI coding agent, as VP of Developer and AI Experiences, says the real answer isn't access. It's fragmented context.

Pete Soderling sits down with Bala to make the case that democratizing access to data was last decade's challenge. The next one is democratizing who gets to build — without creating enterprise chaos in the process. They unpack why governance and speed are no longer in tension, and what it actually looks like when an entire organization, not just the data team, builds from the same trusted foundation.

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

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