Snowflake’s new Sweden chief: Sweden punches above its weight

James Wood has taken over as Snowflake’s Sweden chief after roles at AWS and MongoDB. In an interview with Techtidningen at Snowflake’s world tour in Stockholm, he discussed Swedish companies’ AI plans and the growing focus on digital sovereignty.

Wood moved to Sweden 14 years ago and joined NTT, where he built the company’s Nordic business in global network and cloud services. He later joined AWS. The operation had 14 employees when he started and more than 500 when he left. He then spent three and a half years as MongoDB’s Nordic chief before moving to Snowflake.

Wood said AI could bring business leaders closer to company data, letting them ask questions in natural language instead of relying on a data analyst. He said the next step was to make these processes repeatable and automated with AI agents. He also stressed that organizations need structured data, noting that financial information and sales forecasts are often kept in spreadsheets.

Snowflake recently announced a partnership with Stackit. Wood described it as a parallel option alongside sovereign cloud services from major cloud providers, responding to demand for trusted environments and control over where data is held. He pointed to organizations facing strict regulatory, legal or contractual requirements, including public sector bodies, pharmaceutical companies and businesses serving healthcare.

His advice to CIOs was to focus on problems that matter to the business, draw on partners’ experience and have executives try AI tools themselves. Wood said Sweden performs well on the global stage across startups, large companies and innovation.