Workforce technology leader secures AI at scale with F5

A global workforce technology provider needed airtight AI governance across dozens of internal product teams before it could safely scale AI-enabled services. F5 AI Guardrails gave the company’s security organization the visibility and control needed to expand from a handful of production use cases toward enterprise-wide adoption.

Business Challenge

Large enterprise technology providers face a hard version of a familiar problem: They need to move fast on AI, but a single mishandled data exposure can carry catastrophic regulatory and reputational consequences. This is especially true for companies that manage sensitive workforce data on behalf of hundreds of thousands of client organizations.

One of the world’s largest human capital management and workforce technology providers found themselves in exactly this position. The internal AI program had grown quickly, with more than 50 product teams building AI-enabled tools and services. With dozens of production AI applications already live, the roadmap included hundreds more. The pace of growth put pressure on governance: A single team was responsible for reviewing and clearing every AI application before it went live in production for companywide use. They needed a consistent way to prove that every app was safe to run at scale.

A senior security leader owned the mandate to govern AI across every product team while answering to the company’s most senior technology and privacy executives. This governance model gave the program rigor, but it also meant that any AI security solution would need to satisfy a wide range of stakeholders and hold up under executive scrutiny.

The company needed a way to secure both inbound and outbound AI traffic, including information and prompts sent by employees and systems to AI models, as well as results returned from the models. Protection had to be achieved without slowing the dozens of product teams already building on top of existing AI infrastructure and apps. The solution needed to perform reliably, run on existing company infrastructure, integrate with other security tools, and scale to handle the traffic volumes of a global company.

Solutions

The company selected F5 AI Guardrails, self-hosted inside the company’s own cloud environment and integrated directly into the internal middleware layer that routes all AI traffic across product teams. On request, F5 also developed custom detection capabilities to help fit the solution to the deployment environment. These capabilities included detection for attempts to extract prompts, manipulate the model, or obfuscate or alter data to evade standard scanning. With the solution in place, every prompt sent to an AI model and every response returned is scanned inline and bidirectionally.

Results

Protect sensitive data across every AI interaction

AI Guardrails scans prompts and responses inline, in real time, across traffic routed by every product team through the company’s AI middleware layer. This gives the security organization visibility into both sides of every AI interaction.

Each product team can configure security independently by blocking policy violations in real time, auditing activity without blocking it, or bypassing when appropriate. A platform-wide “kill switch” gives the security team a single point of control in the event of an incident. Results feed automatically into the company’s existing security information and event management (SIEM), giving the security team full visibility into AI activity alongside every other security signal they already monitor, without requiring adoption of a separate, disconnected tool.

Readily scale AI adoption with confidence

The company began with roughly 10 AI applications in production. Early questions about performance were quickly resolved, and the solution remained stable under real production loads and close executive scrutiny. Every deadline was met without disrupting ongoing workflows.

The company is now working toward hundreds of use cases across more than 50 product groups. With a security architecture already proven at scale, the company’s governance team can review and clear new AI use cases faster, giving global product teams a clearer, more consistent path to production. AI Guardrails empowers that growth under an aggressive, executive-driven timeline, expanding capacity as adoption accelerates.

Strengthen governance while easing compliance

Centralized reporting gives the company a robust audit trail to meet compliance standards. Throughout a sequence of executive and governance reviews, AI Guardrails provided the evidence needed to demonstrate that systems were being consistently monitored and controlled. That visibility helped turn governance from a blocker into a repeatable, defensible process that leadership at all levels could stand behind.

Deliver reliability and operational resilience

After early performance questions were resolved through direct, hands-on collaboration with F5 experts, AI Guardrails became one of the most trusted parts of the company’s security stack.

The company’s AI platform lead says, “The F5 solution is so reliable and stable, we’ve kind of forgotten you guys exist… which is the sweet spot for us with security suppliers.”

With the performance of AI Guardrails proven at scale, the company is now exploring additional F5 AI Security Platform capabilities, including red teaming and remediation, to extend that same confidence to a broader set of AI risks.