Ana Villegas

Ana Villegas, Vice President of Integrated Marketing at Cisco, is a proud Latina executive with more than 20 years of experience in B2B and consumer marketing. She’s built a successful career by leaning fully into her strengths and who she is. Authenticity, she says, is her greatest competitive advantage.

Ana’s on a mission to challenge one of the biggest misconceptions about AI: that it’s coming for our jobs. AI isn’t here to replace people, but rather to elevate them. By taking on repetitive work, it frees teams to focus on creativity, strategy, and the kind of human impact no machine can replicate. Her advice to anyone feeling uncertain about AI? “Stay curious. Experiment. Look at your daily work and ask where AI can make your life easier.”

At Cisco, Ana has seen firsthand how empowerment fuels innovation. When teams have the freedom to explore, fail, and fail fast, transformation follows. Her team uses AI for creative testing, localization, audience insights, and more, speeding up processes that once took months to mere hours, with up to 90% accuracy. “When you remove barriers to experimentation,” she says, “small wins add up to transformational change.”