Enrique Tapia Built Cisco's AI Marketing Team From Zero

There is a particular kind of job that does not show up on an org chart until someone insists it should. When Enrique Tapia arrived at Cisco, "AI marketing organization" was that kind of job. It was a phrase in a plan, not a room full of people. No desks. No headcount. No budget line waiting to be spent. What existed was a mandate and a blank page, which is the least glamorous starting position in a company of roughly 87,000 employees.

A few years later the phrase has an org chart of its own. Tapia describes it plainly on his own profile: he built and scaled Cisco's AI marketing organization from zero to more than 25 people, with 45-plus generative AI projects shipped. Those two numbers do a lot of quiet work. One is about hiring and convincing. The other is about output that actually reached the business.

Marketing strategy and analytics is not the part of a technology company that gets written up. It is the plumbing. Someone has to decide where the money goes, which audiences matter this quarter, and whether the last campaign moved anything. Tapia runs that function at Cisco as Vice President of Marketing Strategy and Analytics, working out of Austin, Texas. The title reads like the inside of a machine, because that is what it is.

The blank page is the hard part

Scaling a team gets the headlines. Starting one is the harder trick, and it is easy to skip past when the story is told in reverse. Before the 25 people and the 45 projects, there were the meetings. Arguing for headcount that does not exist yet. Defending a function nobody can benchmark against a competitor. Doing it inside an organization large enough to absorb a new idea without noticing it was ever there.

"Built and scaled Cisco's AI Marketing organization from 0 to 25+ people - 45+ GenAI projects."

That is the whole pitch, in his own words, and it is worth sitting with. Most people wait to be handed a team. The rule that seems to run underneath Tapia's career is closer to the opposite: build the team before the company is certain it needs one, then let the results explain themselves. It is a bet on being early, made repeatedly.

A resume that reads like a map

Line up the companies Tapia has worked for and you have, more or less, a tour of the last fifteen years of enterprise technology. Dell, when the frontier was hardware in classrooms. Box, when the frontier was moving files to the cloud. Splunk, when the frontier was making sense of machine data. Cisco, now, when the frontier is generative AI. Same person, roughly the same instinct, pointed at whatever was new at the time.

At Dell he worked the education vertical during the netbook moment, that short window when a cheap, small laptop looked like the future of computing. He launched the Latitude 2100, a netbook built for K-12 classrooms, and spent his days figuring out how to talk to school districts, which is its own dialect of marketing. He is also credited with an eye for fit: spotting that Dell's KACE acquisition belonged in the public sector business before that was the obvious read.

Pointing at the right thing before it is obvious is not a lucky guess. It is the entire job.

That instinct is the through-line. Analytics people get typecast as the ones who report the past. The good ones are closer to forecasters. They look at this quarter's numbers and describe the shape of the next thing clearly enough that everyone else can follow. The KACE call at Dell and the AI team at Cisco are the same move, years apart.

Splunk, then the jump to scale

From 2019 to 2021 Tapia worked in demand generation and marketing strategy at Splunk, during the stretch when the company was climbing and observability was becoming a category people outside engineering could name. Demand generation is unforgiving work. The pipeline either fills or it does not, and the dashboard tells everyone which it was. It is good training for a leader who would later be asked to prove that a brand-new function was worth its headcount.

Then came Cisco in 2021, first as head of marketing strategy, insights, investment, analytics, campaigns and content. The title alone is a signal of scope. It also explains why the AI team made sense as his project. When your job already touches strategy, budget and measurement across a company this size, you are standing exactly where a new capability would have to plug in.

It is worth noticing how much of that path is about proximity to the frontier rather than proximity to the spotlight. Box was a bet on files leaving the hard drive. Splunk was a bet that machine data would matter to people who had never thought about it. Neither was obvious at the time. Both looked, in hindsight, like the only place a curious marketer would want to be. The pattern is less about picking winners and more about wanting to work on the thing that has not been figured out yet, and being willing to explain it to people who have not caught up.

Why analytics leaders end up building things

There is a reason the person running measurement is often the person who ends up starting the new team. If your job is to know what is working, you are the first to feel the gap when a new tool could work better. You see the wasted spend before anyone else. You see the campaign that could have been targeted more sharply. Sitting on top of the data at a company Cisco's size, generative AI would not have looked like a trend to comment on. It would have looked like a set of specific problems that suddenly had a plausible answer, and someone had to be willing to go build the answer.

That is the unglamorous truth behind the tidy numbers. The 45-plus projects did not arrive as a strategy. They arrived as a backlog of small frustrations that a new technology could finally address, one at a time, with a team that had to be assembled to do it. Zero to 25-plus people is the story of turning a hunch into a standing capability, which is slower and more political than any launch, and usually more durable.

What the numbers actually mean

It is easy to read "45-plus GenAI projects" as a slide in a deck. Inside a company, it means something more specific. It means dozens of experiments that had to be scoped, staffed, argued for, and then either shipped or quietly killed. Some worked. Some did not. The ones that did now sit inside how a Fortune 100 company decides where to spend its marketing dollars. That is a lot of small bets adding up to a new normal.

The 25-plus people are the more durable achievement. Projects come and go. A team is a standing claim on the future, a group of people whose whole reason for existing is a category that was a phrase a few years ago. Building that inside a large organization takes a particular tolerance for slow, unglamorous persuasion. You do not get to skip the part where you convince the room.

Austin, and the quiet version of the job

Tapia runs all of this from Austin, which has become a home base for senior operators doing serious work for coastal tech giants without living on the coast. He speaks English and Spanish natively and has a working start on Portuguese, which is a small detail that quietly matters for anyone marketing to a business world that does not stop at one language.

There is a version of every big company where nothing new ever ships. Too many stakeholders, too much process, too much reason to play it safe. And then there are the people inside those companies who move things anyway, usually without a lot of noise about it. The interesting thing to take from Tapia is not the title or the logo. It is the willingness to treat "build the future" as a side effect of doing the day job unusually well - to write the job description for a team that does not exist yet, and then go staff it.

The blank page is still the scariest thing in any large organization. Tapia's career is a fairly consistent argument that it is also where most of the value gets made, if you are willing to be the one who starts.