Snowflake’s CEO predicted a shift in the AI ecosystem in 2026 that will matter for university research, IT procurement and curriculum: he expects Big Tech’s model dominance to loosen, wider access to competitive models, and emergence of protocols that let specialized AI agents interoperate. Those changes suggest universities will have new avenues to build custom models using institutional data and to deploy agentic systems in research and campus operations. Universities should plan for new governance, data‑sharing agreements and technical standards as open and composable AI architectures reduce vendor lock‑in and enlarge the set of institutions that can field production‑grade models.