In a wide-ranging interview with VentureBeat, former Neeva CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy — who became SVP of data cloud company Snowflake after the company acquired the ad-free, privacy-focused, AI-powered alternative to Google Search — said the “the window is shutting” for AI chatbots to disrupt Google’s consumer search dominance.

“It seems like there was a tiny sliver to truly disrupt consumer search,” he told VentureBeat in an in-person interview at Snowflake’s Manhattan office before jetting off to meet Snowflake customers in New Zealand. “What I mean by that is in an ideal world, you would have ChatGPT and Bing working together to create a believable ChatGPT. They’re not. On the other hand, Sidney, which is the official chatbot from Bing, is getting no market share and is just really, really slow.”

Meanwhile, Google has been slowly but surely working on their own generative search experience called Bard, which which Ramaswamy says is “a little slow but is actually getting better.” So while consumer search powered by language models looked very promising early this year, he explained, and he is “proud of what we did at Neeva,” the window of true disruption to Google search is closing.

Moving into enterprise AI

Neeva decided to move to the enterprise search space — through the Snowflake acquisition — because “it’s a far more predictable way to create value,” said Ramaswamy. At Neeva, he exp...