Full Name
Jon Evans
Job Title
EMEA AI Hyper Specialist
Company
Cisco
Speaker Bio
Jon Evans leads go-to-market for sovereign AI and Neocloud at Cisco, enabling and co-creating joint capabilities with partners for enterprise customers. He is a champion for the Office of the CFO and can attest first-hand to the potency of finance-led transformation: the discipline that keeps a company's balance sheet, and the return on its future AI spend, at the centre of the decision rather than an afterthought. Unifying finance with the business and IT is critical if AI is to deliver the value it can.
He came to the role from the other side of the table. Before rejoining Cisco he spent several years inside a large telco leading finance transformation for the CFO, running the financial assurance organisation across a substantial operating £8.5Bn P&L and, in parallel, transforming the operating model to unify data and process assurance across the business. He led a team of 40 data scientists and a wider programme of 100 people across 15 departments: data assurance linked directly to the P&L, with machine learning and AI driving measurable efficiency across the order-to-cash cycle. That experience taught him where enterprise AI actually breaks. Not in the models, but in the structural layer beneath them: whether the data can be trusted, whether the processes hold, whether the infrastructure can carry production AI securely and at scale.
It is why he stands behind the structural capabilities of the Cisco platform today. He speaks about it as someone who was the customer, who hit those foundational problems first-hand, and who sees in Cisco's networking, data and security layer the capabilities enterprises genuinely need to make AI work in production. Earlier in his career Jon trained as an engineer, founded and exited a venture-backed SaaS company, and led the incubation of Cisco's collaboration cloud go-to-market across EMEA, growing the business beyond $1BN. He writes and speaks from experience, with a particular passion for sovereign AI infrastructure and what it takes to make AI commercially accountable.
He came to the role from the other side of the table. Before rejoining Cisco he spent several years inside a large telco leading finance transformation for the CFO, running the financial assurance organisation across a substantial operating £8.5Bn P&L and, in parallel, transforming the operating model to unify data and process assurance across the business. He led a team of 40 data scientists and a wider programme of 100 people across 15 departments: data assurance linked directly to the P&L, with machine learning and AI driving measurable efficiency across the order-to-cash cycle. That experience taught him where enterprise AI actually breaks. Not in the models, but in the structural layer beneath them: whether the data can be trusted, whether the processes hold, whether the infrastructure can carry production AI securely and at scale.
It is why he stands behind the structural capabilities of the Cisco platform today. He speaks about it as someone who was the customer, who hit those foundational problems first-hand, and who sees in Cisco's networking, data and security layer the capabilities enterprises genuinely need to make AI work in production. Earlier in his career Jon trained as an engineer, founded and exited a venture-backed SaaS company, and led the incubation of Cisco's collaboration cloud go-to-market across EMEA, growing the business beyond $1BN. He writes and speaks from experience, with a particular passion for sovereign AI infrastructure and what it takes to make AI commercially accountable.
