She will report to Frank Feldmann, the chief strategy officer, and be in charge of development and execution of the company's AI strategy.

A statement from SUSE said Santamaria had more than 25 years experience in technology and go-to-market leadership, with expertise in AI, IoT, cyber security and cloud.

Before joining SUSE, she was the head of EMEA Cloud Solutions at Google, where she introduced Vertex AI.

Santamaria has also held senior leadership roles at Dell, Microsoft, Cisco, Nortel and Siemens, and serves as a cloud expert for the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union.

“Since joining the team, Pilar has evolved SUSE’s AI strategy at pace, acting as a true catalyst across the company. She and her team are going to deliver outstanding results for our customers and change how we innovate as an organisation,” said Feldmann.

“I’m excited to see the fruits of those developments come to life on stage at SUSECON.”

Santamaria will take the stage at SUSE’s annual developer conference, SUSECON, in June in Berlin and outline her vision for SUSE’s approach to AI and share exciting updates about the company’s developments in AI.

“It's clear that open source is the future of AI. Compared to the first wave of AI solutions we’ve seen emerge over the past few years, open source AI has noticeable advantages when it comes to privacy, compliance, security, flexibility and cost,” she said.

“SUSE is ideally positioned to bring these benefits to customers, and I'm thrilled to be a part of the team that will make that happen.”

SUSECON allows SUSE customers, partners and community members to get together and explore how the latest open source advances can meet the technical needs and business challenges of the enterprise IT customer. This year, the annual conference will take place from 17 to 19 June in Berlin.