Veeam Appoints Mika Yamamoto as Chief Marketing and Customer AI Officer

Veeam has appointed Mika Yamamoto as Chief Marketing and Customer AI Officer, creating a leadership role that combines responsibility for global marketing with oversight of the company's customer AI strategy. The appointment comes as the data resilience vendor expands its positioning around trusted data and enterprise AI.

Yamamoto will lead Veeam's global marketing organization while also owning its customer AI framework, which the company said is designed to make customer interactions more relevant and informed by previous engagements. Veeam said the role will also help customers better understand how to secure and maximize the value of their data as organizations deploy AI across their operations.

"Mika brings that rare combination of experience across enterprise marketing, sales, support, customer experience, and go-to-market transformation for an AI world," CEO Anand Eswaran said in a statement. He added that Yamamoto's experience would help shape how the company engages customers while driving growth and strengthening its brand.

The appointment is part of a shift across enterprise software companies, where AI is increasingly being embedded into customer-facing functions alongside products. That trend has also elevated the importance of governance and measurable business outcomes. 

Appointment aligns with Veeam's broader AI strategy

Yamamoto joins Veeam from Freshworks, where she served as Chief Integrated Customer Growth Officer and oversaw AI-powered customer and employee experiences spanning marketing, sales, customer success, and support. Earlier, she was Chief Customer Engagement and Marketing Officer at F5, President of Marketo before its acquisition by Adobe, and held senior marketing leadership positions at SAP and Microsoft. She also serves on the board of directors of BlackLine.

"I’m excited to join this incredible team," Yamamoto said. "Organizations 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. Veeam is well-positioned to deliver this value."

The leadership appointment follows a series of announcements that have expanded Veeam's focus beyond backup and recovery toward AI governance and trusted data. Earlier this month, the company introduced new capabilities for its DataAI Command Platform that address operational privacy, AI governance, consent management, and compliance for agentic AI environments.

Veeam has also published research highlighting the operational challenges organizations face as AI adoption accelerates. Its latest EMEA survey found many enterprises are moving ahead with AI deployments despite gaps in data visibility, sovereignty, and compliance, reinforcing the company's emphasis on trusted data as the foundation for enterprise AI.

That strategy increasingly positions Veeam as a provider of data resilience, governance, and AI trust rather than backup software alone. The company describes itself as the "Data and AI Trust Company," with a platform that combines security, governance, compliance, privacy, and resilience to help organizations establish trusted data for AI applications.

Headquartered in Seattle, Veeam says it serves more than 550,000 customers worldwide, including 80% of the Fortune 500.