Veeam Software has appointed Mika Yamamoto as chief marketing and customer AI officer, a newly created executive role that fuses responsibility for the company's global marketing organisation with direct oversight of its customer AI strategy.
The appointment, announced this week, signals how data resilience and backup vendors are rethinking the CMO mandate as enterprise AI adoption accelerates. Yamamoto will lead Veeam's global marketing efforts while building a customer AI framework designed to make every interaction more relevant, contextual, and consistent across the full customer journey.
Anand Eswaran, CEO of Veeam, said the framework will help ensure each customer engagement builds on previous interactions while giving organisations clearer guidance on how to maximise the value and security of their data.
A combined marketing and AI mandate
Yamamoto's role breaks from the traditional CMO mold by explicitly tying marketing leadership to AI implementation for customers. Eswaran pointed to her cross-functional background as the reason the dual remit makes sense.
"She has experienced this industry from every angle - analyst, operator, executive leader - and has consistently put the customer and partner at the centre of how companies operate," Eswaran said. "She knows how to drive growth through building a brand, creating demand, and connecting the entire story from first impression to value delivered."
The structure reflects a broader shift in how B2B technology companies are integrating AI strategy into marketing leadership. For CMOs navigating similar expansions of their role, dedicated training paths like the AI Learning Path for CMOs address the specific intersection of executive marketing leadership and AI implementation.
Career built across tech giants
Yamamoto joins Veeam from Freshworks, where she served as chief integrated customer growth officer, overseeing AI-powered customer and employee experience across marketing, sales, customer success, and support. Before that, she held senior leadership positions at F5 as chief customer engagement and marketing officer, and at Marketo, where she was president before the company's acquisition by Adobe and later became general manager of the Marketo business.
Earlier in her career, she held senior marketing roles at SAP and Microsoft, was a research vice president at Gartner, and worked as a consultant at Accenture. She also serves on the board of directors of BlackLine, where she chairs the compensation committee.
Commenting on her appointment, Yamamoto tied the opportunity directly to the growing enterprise demand for trusted data infrastructure. "Organisations are putting AI to work across every function in their businesses. They need complete visibility, control, and security over the data behind their agentic and human-driven processes on a single trusted platform," she said. "Veeam is well-positioned to deliver this value."
Why this matters for marketing professionals
Yamamoto's appointment points to a structural change in how companies view marketing leadership. The role no longer stops at brand, demand generation, and communications. It now extends into customer experience architecture powered by AI, requiring CMOs to understand data pipelines, personalisation engines, and the security implications of how customer data moves through AI systems.
For marketing leaders watching this shift, the signal is clear: fluency in AI strategy is becoming a baseline expectation at the executive level, not a specialist add-on. Companies are consolidating these responsibilities under one leader who can connect marketing spend to measurable customer outcomes across the entire lifecycle.
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