Snowflake's CEO rejects a "YOLO AI" approach where model outputs are unpredictable. He insists enterprise AI products must be trustworthy, treating their development with the same discipline as software engineering. This includes mandatory evaluations (evals) for every model change to ensure reliability.

A critical hurdle for enterprise AI is managing context and permissions. Just as people silo work friends from personal friends, AI systems must prevent sensitive information from one context (e.g., CEO chats) from leaking into another (e.g., company-wide queries). This complex data siloing is a core, unsolved product problem.

Traditional AI security is reactive, trying to stop leaks after sensitive data has been processed. A streaming data architecture offers a proactive alternative. It acts as a gateway, filtering or masking sensitive information *before* it ever reaches the untrusted AI agent, preventing breaches at the infrastructure level.

A key differentiator is that Katera's AI agents operate directly on a company's existing data infrastructure (Snowflake, Redshift). Enterprises prefer this model because it avoids the security risks and complexities of sending sensitive data to a third-party platform for processing.

MLOps pipelines manage model deployment, but scaling AI requires a broader "AI Operating System." This system serves as a central governance and integration layer, ensuring every AI solution across the business inherits auditable data lineage, compliance, and standardized policies.

A single AI agent can provide personalized and secure responses by dynamically adopting the data access permissions of the person querying it. This ensures users only see data they are authorized to view, maintaining granular governance without separate agent instances.

Ali Ghodsi argues that while public LLMs are a commodity, the true value for enterprises is applying AI to their private data. This is impossible without first building a modern data foundation that allows the AI to securely and effectively access and reason on that information.

Standalone AI tools often lack enterprise-grade compliance like HIPAA and GDPR. A central orchestration platform provides a crucial layer for access control, observability, and compliance management, protecting the business from risks associated with passing sensitive data to unvetted AI services.

To balance security with agility, enterprises should run two AI tracks. Let the CIO's office develop secure, custom models for sensitive data while simultaneously empowering business units like marketing to use approved, low-risk SaaS AI tools to maintain momentum and drive immediate value.