José Luis Salazar Valenzuela is a Senior Account Executive driving AI Infrastructure & NeoClouds with Service Providers across EMEA. In his current role, he leads Cisco’s go-to-market for AI, Sovereign Infrastructure, and NeoCloud architectures, working with customers and partners to scale trusted, energy-efficient, and differentiated AI platforms. He brings deep cross-domain expertise across AI, optics, cloud infrastructure, and partner ecosystems. Previously, José Luis served as Global Partner Go-To-Market Lead for Cisco’s Optics and Internet & Mass-Scale Infrastructure portfolio, driving the transition to high-speed, power-efficient optical networking to support hybrid work and AI workloads. Before that, he led Cisco’s global Customer Experience partner strategy, and earlier was responsible for global partner sales across Energy, Transportation, IoT, and Digital Transformation. José Luis joined Cisco in 2006 as an Enterprise Systems Engineer. He was later recognized for strategic wins as Emerging Technologies Technical Lead in Ireland, then transitioned into sales roles as Territory Business Manager and Large Opportunities Account Manager. Prior to Cisco, José Luis held R&D and pre-sales roles at Eircom, Ericsson Eurolab Deutschland, and Nortel Networks across Germany, Sweden, and Ireland. His work spanned software development, encryption technologies, telecoms management, mobility, and unified communications. He holds a Master of Science in Engineering (Data Communications) from the University of Sheffield (UK), where he was awarded a scholarship by the National Council on Science and Technology of Mexico to course his degree. He also holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics & Communications with a Graduate Diploma in Telecommunications from Tecnológico de Monterrey. José Luis has completed executive programs in Advanced Artificial Intelligence (Stanford University Graduate School of Business), AI for Digital Transformation (Cornell Tech), Data Analytics (Cornell SC Johnson College of Business), and Strategic Execution (Duke Fuqua School of Business).