AI Data Cloud company Snowflake has published the report Startup 2026: AI Agents Mean Business. In the report, eight leading venture capital investors from around the world share their perspectives on how AI agents are reshaping the business landscape and influencing investments in AI startups. Among the investors is Swedish investor Carl Fritjofsson, General Partner at the venture firm Creandum.
The report makes it clear that companies are moving past a phase of broad and often unfocused AI experimentation. Attention is shifting toward how the technology delivers measurable business value and tangible returns. Investors expect 2026 to be the year when AI agents become firmly embedded in mission-critical business operations.
“We are approaching a transition away from wide-ranging AI experiments toward a focus on where the technology actually generates returns,” says Carl Fritjofsson. Instead of chasing the newest tools, companies are concentrating on concrete outcomes and profitability.
The report also highlights pronounced regional differences. Large enterprises in Europe are adopting AI more slowly than their counterparts in the United States. U.S. companies are moving more quickly to put AI into production, which makes governance, security and access questions increasingly important.
“As an investor active in both the U.S. and Europe, we see adoption moving slower in Europe,” says Carl Fritjofsson. “American companies push AI into production earlier, while European firms tend to be more cautious.”
As the market matures, the report identifies several challenges: the financing environment is tightening, investors demand clearer competitive advantages, and striking the right balance between innovation and regulation becomes more critical.
“Historically, startups have often been the primary source of innovation,” Fritjofsson notes. “Today, the race for innovation is happening everywhere. My concern is that larger companies—even if they move more slowly—can still win through their distribution and brand trust, even when their AI solutions are less sophisticated than those of startups.”
The full report also outlines how venture capitalists evaluate AI companies, where they see new investment opportunities, and how they collaborate with founders to turn agentic AI into sustainable, long-term businesses.
About Snowflake
Snowflake is a platform for the AI era that enables companies to innovate faster and extract more value from their data. More than 12,600 customers worldwide use Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud to build, deploy and share data applications and AI solutions. Snowflake is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SNOW.