Snowflake, Databricks and the Model Makers: The Battle for the Agentic Client and AI Backend

Agentic AI is being misread as a series of separate battles - e.g. Snowflake vs. Databricks, copilots vs. agents, model makers vs. app vendors, etc. We think the real story is that the biggest opportunity in software is converging around 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’s CoWork & CoCo, Databricks Genie, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini Enterprise, ChatGPT/Codex, Claude/Cowork and others. But that client cannot deliver business outcomes without a new back end - what we call a System of Intelligence - that represents a model of the enterprise in terms of its business rules and tacit knowledge. You can’t build one without the other. We frame this premise using Clay Christensen’s integrated innovation and Jensen’s extreme co-design as applied to enterprise software.
That is why Snowflake is the focal point for this Breaking Analysis, but not the whole story. Snowflake is not just competing with Databricks anymore. It is now in the same strategic arena as Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, Celonis and others - all trying to define where business users, builders and agents get work done, and where the enterprise context that powers that work gets built.