Snowflake, Databricks and the model makers: The battle for the agentic client and AI back end - SiliconANGLE

Snowflake, Databricks and the model makers: The battle for the agentic client and AI back end

BREAKING ANALYSIS by

Agentic artificial intelligence is being misread as a set of separate battles – for example, Snowflake Inc. versus Databricks Inc., copilots versus agents, model makers versus application vendors. We believe the larger fight is converging around a single question: 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 CoWork and CoCo, Databricks Genie, Microsoft Corp.’s Copilot, Google LLC’s Gemini Enterprise, OpenAI Group PBC’s ChatGPT/Codex, Anthropic PBC’s Claude/Cowork and others. These clients will become the place where business users, builders and agents get work done. But they require a new back end – what we call the System of Intelligence – that models enterprise data, business rules and tacit organizational knowledge in a way that both humans and agents can understand and act upon.

We frame this premise through Clay Christensen’s integrated innovation and Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Jensen Huang’s extreme co-design, applied to enterprise software. The intelligent client and the System of Intelligence back end have to be designed together because the back end learns from business users and builders interacting through the intelligent client. That is why Snowflake is the focal point for this Breaking Analysis, but the story is much broader than Snowflake versus Databricks. Snowflake is now competing in the same strategic arena as Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce Inc., SAP SE, ServiceNow Inc., Celonis SE and others. They are all trying to capture, harmonize and encode a digital representation of how an enterprise operates.