Global consulting firm secures and optimizes AI with F5

A premier global consulting firm partnered with F5 to address AI security, governance, and adoption challenges. The objectives included improved visibility into AI usage, risk mitigation, and strategic cost optimization. As a result, the firm reduced costs, improved AI adoption, enhanced data protection, enabled deployment of a secure, private LLM, and measurably improved ROI across the organization.

Business Challenge

The consulting firm provides planning and design services for transportation, environmental, urban planning, water resources, and construction engineering projects for customers around the world. With over 6,000 employees across more than 100 offices, the firm manages complex infrastructure projects that require stringent data security and regulatory compliance. As a trusted advisor to both public and private sector clients, the organization handles sensitive project data, proprietary designs, and confidential client information daily.

Like many forward-thinking enterprises, this consulting firm recognized that AI represented a transformative opportunity to enhance productivity and deliver greater value to clients. However, the firm faced critical challenges:

Lack of visibility: Leaders had no clear understanding of how employees were using AI tools across the organization or whether team members were uploading sensitive client data to public AI services.
No clear adoption strategy: Without visibility into current usage patterns and risk exposure, the firm couldn’t develop an informed strategy for enterprise-wide AI adoption.
Security and compliance concerns: As a firm handling critical infrastructure projects and confidential client data, they needed assurance that AI adoption wouldn’t create vulnerabilities or compliance violations.
The operational burden of enterprise AI infrastructure: The organization’s existing enterprise AI services required substantial IT resources to maintain the underlying technology stack. Managing multiple underlying services, updates, and endpoint security patches diverted valuable IT personnel from core technology initiatives while creating ongoing operational overhead.

These circumstances reflect a common challenge in enterprise AI adoption: Organizations often make large upfront investments in enterprise AI services without understanding actual user demand or preferences, leading to costly underutilized licenses. But inefficiencies in this area can expose sensitive client data and misalign AI investments. Additionally, the firm’s existing enterprise AI infrastructure demanded extensive resources to maintain, diverting IT efforts from core initiatives.

Solutions

The consulting firm partnered with F5 to transform these challenges through a comprehensive security and governance approach. They deployed F5 Workforce AI Security to gain comprehensive visibility into AI usage across the enterprise so leaders could identify risks and inefficiencies. The solution included capabilities for monitoring shadow AI use, analyzing risk patterns, and enabling a secure private AI environment.

These strategies addressed security, compliance, and cost optimization challenges, while improving governance and adoption outcomes.

Results

Gain full visibility into enterprise AI usage

Workforce AI Security provided unprecedented visibility into AI usage across the entire workforce. Teams could now monitor user activity, AI agents, developer tools, and cross-platform coverage across both public and private AI implementations. The firm gained observability into:

Department-specific activity, including detailed insights into how consulting, sales, and back-office teams were using AI tools differently.
Shadow AI inventory, with complete discovery of unauthorized AI subscriptions and services across all business units.
Cross-platform coverage enabled by monitoring across both public AI services and private AI applications.
Risk pattern analysis enabling identification of high-risk activities where sensitive data might be exposed to unauthorized systems.

Detailed analysis of AI adoption patterns revealed high-risk activities and underutilized investments, uncovering enterprise AI inefficiencies and enabling strategic decision-making. For instance, the monitoring capabilities revealed a significant misalignment between the firm's AI investments and actual usage patterns. Workforce AI Security’s detailed analytics showed that the consulting firm had substantially over-invested in an enterprise AI service, with adoption rates far below expectations. The data demonstrated that employees were either not using the expensive enterprise service or were turning to alternative AI tools that better met their workflow needs.

Significantly reduce AI service costs

Armed with clear visibility into their AI investment inefficiencies, the consulting firm quickly pivoted their strategy. Rather than continuing to pay for underutilized licenses for the enterprise AI service, they leveraged Workforce AI Security to deploy a private Claude LLM through the F5 portal.

This strategic shift delivered immediate benefits:

Significant cost savings: By scaling back their investment in the underused enterprise licenses and redirecting users to the more cost-effective private LLM solution, the firm dramatically reduced AI-related expenditures.
Increased adoption and enhanced employee workflows: Workforce AI Security provided a more user-friendly interface that better aligned with employee workflows, resulting in higher actual adoption rates.
Measurable ROI: Clear metrics on AI usage and value creation informed subsequent investment decisions.

Reduce risk of data loss and noncompliance

Workforce AI Security enhanced protection and secured client information. Visibility into risk patterns also empowered the firm to identify and better protect high-risk activities that might expose sensitive data.

In addition, the strategic move to a private LLM environment ensured critical AI interactions remained within the firm’s secure environment,further mitigating data loss and aligning with regulatory requirements for infrastructure projects.

Accelerate AI adoption and improve ROI

Deploying user-friendly AI solutions tailored to actual employee needs significantly accelerated adoption across departments.

By implementing Workforce AI Security, the consulting firm successfully transformed AI from a potential security liability into a strategic asset. Comprehensive AI visibility uncovers hidden inefficiencies in the enterprise’s AI investments, enabling the organization to make data-driven decisions that reduce risk as well as optimize both costs and adoption outcomes.

As a result, the firm measurably improved ROI by aligning AI investments with actual usage patterns and employee preferences.