PODCAST

Women in Tech Sweden

Maria Sandgren: Would You Let an AI Agent Buy Your Next Car?

Would you let an AI agent buy your next car? Maria Sandgren thinks that could be possible within a year. But she will still choose her own boat.

Maria is Executive Vice President and Chief Product and Technology Officer at Vend, the Nordic marketplace company with brands such as Blocket, and this is her very first podcast. Her route into tech started in the 1990s with a computer that did not work, and it led her from law and politics to leading product and technology across recommerce, real estate, mobility and jobs.

In this conversation with Elin Eriksson, Maria Sandgren shares:

• Why trust is the thing to get right for both humans and AI agents, and why agents can find things today but are not yet trusted to buy them
• What it took to turn four national organizations into one Vend culture with more than 30 nationalities
• How Vend approaches AI with a Department of AI, 1,000 days to become AI driven and whole days with empty calendars, and why AI fatigue is part of the conversation
• What a dare culture looks like in practice, from learning lunches to openness about neurodiversity
• Why disruptive times open doors for women and non-binary people in tech

Maria’s message to the Women in Tech Sweden community: tech is a broad place, and it is the place to be if you want to drive change.

This episode was produced in collaboration with Vend.

Women in Tech Sweden

11. Carolin Viklund & Wilhelm Sahlberg: Concrete, Code & the Career Nobody's Talking About

Have you been thinking about how the buildings we live and work in are untapped potential for an excellent career in tech? Maybe not. Yet. And still, buildings and properties are one of the last great frontiers left to digitalize. In this episode, host Elin Eriksson talks to Carolin Viklund, Managing Director, and Wilhelm Sahlberg, Product Manager, at Nordomatic Property Tech, about what it’s like building the foundations of an entire industry from scratch, right as AI starts amplifying that work instead of replacing it.

Women in Tech Sweden

10. Maria Wiss: Disruption, Data & Leading from the Eye of the Storm

Maria Wiss left Google. On purpose. Not because things went wrong, but because she saw an opportunity to once again be working “in the eye of the storm”, where enterprise AI is being built right now. Maria Wiss, Regional Vice President EMEA North at Snowflake, has built a career by running toward disruption while everyone else is still reading the memo. In this episode, she gets honest about imposter syndrome, the art of being your own coach, and why diversity in recruitment isn’t a nice-to-have: it’s the whole game. She also breaks down what agentic AI actually means for your business, and why the companies moving fastest right now all have one thing in common: a data strategy.

This is a conversation about ambition, leadership, and what it looks like to genuinely thrive, not just survive, in the age of AI.