Personal agents light the fuse as Snowflake and Databricks move up the AI stack
BREAKING ANALYSIS by
The artificial intelligence wave is starting to look a bit like the personal computer era – with some obvious differences.
The first similarity is personal productivity. Individuals are taking control of their own work with agents, open tools and repeatable skills, much like power users once did with spreadsheets, word processors, presentation graphics and PCs. The early mandate for AI came from the top – CEOs and boards pushing AI into the enterprise – but the first phase of adoption is increasingly bottom up. People are downloading tools, wiring them into their own workflows and finding ways to get more done without waiting for a formal enterprise transformation program.
But there is a major difference between this wave and the PC era. Agents don’t just create documents, spreadsheets and dashboards. They can act. They can touch data, invoke tools, call applications and, over time, execute work. So if every person, department and vendor builds its own island of intelligence, enterprises will recreate the same silo problem that has plagued software for decades – only faster, with greater operational risk. This may be a necessary step on the journey, but it cannot be the end state.
