Welcome back to Ahead of the Herd. This time, Yoav Naveh sits down with Frank Slootman, the executive who took not one but three companies public, including Snowflake's record-setting IPO, and spent six years before that as CEO of ServiceNow. Slootman isn't running a company right now, which puts him in a rare spot: nothing to sell, nothing to defend, just a front-row view of where AI is actually headed. The conversation moves fast, from the "candy store" of AI use cases across every industry, to why enterprises are quietly stacking GPUs for on-prem AI, to the uncomfortable question sitting underneath all of it: as companies go from experimenting with a couple of AI agents to running hundreds of them, who actually owns that? Slootman's answer draws on decades of watching incumbents get blindsided by technology they thought they understood, and it says as much about the future of work as it does about the future of software.
Takeaways:
- AI's real opportunity isn't automation, it's obsolescence of the old swim lanes. Slootman says the technology has outpaced most companies' ability to use it. The winners won't be the ones who digitize existing workflows faster, they'll be the ones who notice their entire category is dissolving and move before it's obvious.
- The agent army needs a general. Managing one or two AI agents is manageable, like everyone keeping an eye on a single kid. Managing a thousand agents is a different problem entirely. Slootman and Naveh agree that enterprises are going to need something like a "center of excellence" for AI agents, a real owner accountable for their lifecycle, not just a side project bolted onto someone's existing job.
- Consumption pricing is coming for industries that don't want it. Cybersecurity still sells on seats and devices, not usage. Slootman predicts that model won't survive AI's shift toward paying for what you actually consume, and incumbents built on predictable licensing revenue are going to feel that shift as a threat, not an upgrade.
- On-prem AI is getting a second life. Cloud adoption never fully finished, and AI isn't necessarily pushing laggards there faster. Slootman points to enterprises suddenly discovering they have thousands of GPUs sitting around, betting that on-prem sticks around longer than expected because companies want guardrails around their AI.
- Bet on the elevator, not your resume. Slootman's career advice, distilled from watching a smokestack manufacturing business die in front of him as a young man: get as close to the technology that's ascending as you can. Talent matters less than picking an elevator that's actually going up.
Quote of the Show:
- “You wanna step into an elevator that's going up, not one that's going down or one that's sitting still." - Frank Slootman
Links:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frankslootman/
- Website: https://www.snowflake.com/en/