Most agent demos look impressive. Far fewer survive contact with messy data, unclear permissions, brittle workflows, and unpredictable costs.
Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product at Snowflake, lays out the hard truths: where autonomous workflows are producing measurable value, where the industry is overselling, and why many initiatives fail for reasons unrelated to model quality.
This conversation focuses on the practical requirements for deploying AI agents at scale.
This Friday, Dec. 19 at 10am PT / 1pm ET · Add to Calendar
Join the live conversation and ask Christian your questions!
The conversation covers:
Data readiness: Why agents fail without a unified strategy for structured and unstructured data
Governance as an accelerator: Closing the trust gap so agents can move from answering questions to taking action
AI economics: Moving from prepaid commitments to measuring ROI and controlling the cost of agentic workflows in production
Workforce impact: How agentic automation reshapes roles, team design, and accountability when agents absorb work once done by teams
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Episode Participants
Christian Kleinerman is Snowflake’s EVP of Product and has been with the company since 2018. He oversees the company’s global product strategy and vision. Christian is a database expert with over 20 years of experience working with various database technologies and has more than 15 years of management and leadership experience. Most recently, Christian worked at Google leading YouTube’s infrastructure and data systems. Prior to that, he served as General Manager of the Data Warehousing product unit at Microsoft. He is a named inventor on numerous Snowflake patents.
Michael Krigsman is a globally recognized analyst, strategic advisor, and industry commentator known for his deep business transformation, innovation, and leadership expertise. He has presented at industry events worldwide and written extensively on the reasons for IT failures. His work has been referenced in the media over 1,000 times and in more than 50 books and journal articles; his commentary on technology trends and business strategy reaches a global audience.
Upcoming Live Schedule
Dec. 19: Christian Kleinerman, EVP of Product, Snowflake
Jan 9: Burkhard Boeckem, Chief Technology Officer, Hexagon AB
Jan. 16: Prashant Mehrotra, EVP and Chief AI Officer, US Bank
Jan. 30: Raj Sharma, Global Managing Partner for Growth & Innovation, EY
Feb. 6: Alex "Sandy" Pentland, Stanford University and MIT
Feb 13. Dr. Tom Frieden, former Director, US Centers for Disease Control
Feb 27: Rob T. Lee, Chief AI Officer (CAIO) and Chief of Research, SANS Institute, with David A. Bray, Ph.D., Distinguished Fellow and Head of the Accelerator, The Stimson Center
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