Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy says 2026 will be a turning point for AI as it moves from basic chatbots and assistants to autonomous systems that can reason, plan, and act across core business functions, with a major shift away from dominance by a few Big Tech players as open-source models and tailored solutions rise, loosening the grip of giants like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. He predicts a new standard protocol for AI agents that lets them collaborate across platforms, a divide between creative, strategic AI use and generic “slop,” and a future where the best AI products continuously learn from user feedback. Ramaswamy also expects enterprises to demand measurable reliability before widely scaling AI, sees ideas becoming more valuable than execution, and notes that “shadow AI” adoption by employees will drive formal enterprise strategies from the ground up.
