Genesis’ Co-Worker Agents Lend AI-Powered Assistance

Welcome to Snowflake’s Startup Spotlight, where we ask startup founders about the problems they’re solving, the apps they’re building and the lessons they’ve learned during their startup journey. In this edition, we’ll learn why the founders of Genesis, Matt Glickman and Justin Langseth, decided to take on the challenge of creating AI-powered assistants to run generative AI workloads in Snowflake, and why “Eliza” and “Stuart” might soon be joining your team meetings. 

Explain Genesis in one sentence.

AI co-worker agents that just work, running as native applications in Snowflake.

What problem does your company aim to solve? 

Gen AI demos are easy, production gen AI is hard. Almost all enterprises are expending significant resources to bring cool gen AI demos into production. Most are underestimating both the work involved to do this as well as the real potential of this technology. We want to keep them from falling into the trough of disillusionment.

Genesis is the AI coworker platform to run production enterprise gen AI workloads securely inside Snowflake. In addition to providing the platform, Genesis comes with prebuilt Genesis Bots, or Genbots: fully autonomous agent knowledge workers ready to work alongside their human counterparts. The Genbots cover a variety of roles, from Snowflake janitor Janice, who optimizes and organizes an enterprise’s Snowflake environment, to Eve, the mother of all Genbots, who creates and administers the other Genbots.

What was the turning point that inspired you to found Genesis?

When we were coworkers at Snowflake, we won several of Snowflake’s annual internal Snowvation hackathons, including one for creating an OpenAI Assistant-powered data analyst. After seeing hundreds of enterprise customers attempt much less ambitious projects to enable their users with LLMs, the two of us decided to found Genesis Computing. Our mission is to combine the Snowflake platform with state-of-the-art foundational gen AI models to power fully autonomous, personified knowledge workers (aka Genbots) to fuel the AI economy. 

Incorporated for only five weeks, Genesis leveraged the Snowflake Native App Framework to launch its first three Genbots: Eliza the Data Engineer, Stuart the Data Steward and Eve, creator and manager of Genbots. They’re all live and in use with various organizations today, and are available through Snowflake Marketplace.

What’s the coolest thing you’re doing with data? 

The coolest thing we are doing (so far) is letting autonomous AI workers activate business workflows. At Snowflake Data Cloud Summit, we showed how Marty, the Marketing Campaign Manager Genbot, autonomously triggers, activates and manages campaigns based on customer segmentation data in Snowflake.

How has the Snowflake Native App Framework shaped your startup’s growth and development strategy?

Once committed to starting Genesis, we realized that a super-aggressive yet irresistible goal was to have our first product live and on display in time for Snowflake’s annual summit in June. We incorporated on April 8, signed up as a Summit sponsor on April 9, pulled an all-nighter to develop our logo and booth graphics on April 10, and then designed, built and deployed Genesis Bots into customers’ hands in less than seven weeks — just in time to be live on Snowflake Marketplace at Snowflake Data Cloud Summit on June 3! 

The fact that a seven-week-old startup could have an AI-powered application “operating system” up and running and working on customers’ most data-sensitive assets via a click in Snowflake Marketplace would not have been possible without Snowflake Native Apps. 

As founders, what’s a piece of advice you swear by when it comes to running a startup? 

Take advantage of the rare opportunities where you are ahead of the pack, and manifest the future to happen today.

AI is on everyone’s mind. How has it impacted your startup? 

Not only is our product an AI product, but we are leveraging AI in everything we do to move faster. From designing our logo to developing business plans and even to writing a lot of the Genesis code, we’re able to work more productively in the “flow state” of AI without constant context-switching.

What ideas and innovations do you find exciting, concerning or valuable in the rapidly changing AI landscape? 

AI agents — and the LLMs that will continue to improve to support them — are the breakthrough that AI has been waiting for. Instead of AI being limited to “AI fact machines” that can misremember facts, agentic workflows leverage the real power of intelligent reasoning machines to leverage tools as humans do and to perform in a human-like manner.

What’s on the horizon for you and Genesis?

A great deal of the business process — the stuff that keeps the lights on in enterprises — never gets formalized or memorialized. At best it’s spoken about in emails, Slack, Teams or other meetings; at worst it’s inferred by those communications. Genesis Bots will soon begin to learn what needs to be done for their organization’s specific processes and incorporate those learnings securely within the enterprise. Just as an enterprise benefits from the knowledge of experienced employees, it will benefit as Genbots become experienced assets that produce scalable, business-process dividends.  

Learn more about Genesis and its AI-powered agents at genesiscomputing.ai, explore their app on Snowflake Marketplace or read the company’s post on the Snowflake Builder Blog on Medium for technical details. If you’re a startup building on Snowflake, check out the Powered by Snowflake Startup Program for info on how Snowflake can support your goals.