When I joined F5 three months ago, I came with a clear priority: to listen. I’ve spent much of that time with customers, analysts, and product teams, looking for the patterns behind the pressures enterprises are feeling right now.
As I listen to enterprise leaders from around the globe, three themes keep coming up: AI is moving from experimentation into production, hybrid multicloud has become the operating reality, and the threat landscape is accelerating faster than traditional defenses were built to handle.
“Consistent policies. Unified visibility. The freedom to deploy anywhere. This is how organizations break free from complexity—and finally unlock the real promise of AI.”
For customers, these are not disparate challenges. They are converging at the application layer, where performance, availability, and security need to come together. That is why the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP) matters.
AI inference Is becoming core infrastructure
While most of the AI conversations I’ve been having focus on models and applications, what’s less visible, but just as important, is the underlying infrastructure.
Customers want to understand how inference traffic is routed, how they can move data securely between storage and data, and how they can protect AI agents as they move into production. As one security leader put it, “We're done stitching together point solutions for AI delivery and security. We need an integrated solution that optimizes inference performance, manages token economics, and holds up when someone's actively trying to break our guardrails, while keeping the security testing in place."
To address these challenges, it’s becoming clear that enterprises require a net-new insertion point for managing AI inference. This new point of control needs to span data delivery, load balancing across GPU environments, and runtime security for models and agents.
F5 is establishing itself as that AI inference control plane, building on our decades of expertise at the application layer. Converged services are what made hybrid multicloud manageable at scale, and the same is true for AI inference. F5 ADSP provides the structural advantage needed to solve for this new complexity.
Hybrid multicloud Is the new reality
Our recent 2026 State of Application Strategy Report found that 93% of enterprises now operate in hybrid multicloud environments across an average of 14 on-premises, co-location facilities, and public cloud providers. While there are clear advantages to operating across a distributed landscape, the resulting complexity can be overwhelming, especially for those relying on fragmented toolsets. Managing disparate tools is incredibly time-consuming, and it can lead to inconsistencies in security, performance, and policies applied across different environments.
One customer I spoke to said they had one tool for the cloud, another for their on-premises environment, and nothing that gave them a single view of policies across both. As they repatriated workloads for AI and compliance reasons, that fragmentation was becoming a real risk—and they were looking for a way to establish consistent policies and security across all their workloads.
This is one of the areas where F5 shines. Years ago, F5 anticipated the shift to hybrid multicloud, and built our platform to embrace it. With F5 ADSP, organizations obtain the ability to deliver, secure, and optimize all of their apps and APIs across environments, simplifying what would otherwise be an unsustainable situation.
The threat landscape Is outpacing legacy defenses
A third area of concern for business leaders is the rapidly changing threat landscape. As AI continues to take hold, the threats are more frequent, more varied, and more sophisticated than traditional defenses were designed to handle.
In an era of AI-driven threats, customers I've spoken with—especially those in financial services and healthcare—realize that minimum, compliance-driven security measures aren’t enough. They’re starting to bolster their security by prioritizing best-in-class AI-powered web application firewall WAF and API security. And they know that comprehensive measures are needed to keep pace.
Again, this is where F5 has a distinct role to play. Our deep heritage in application-layer security, now extended with F5 AI Guardrails, F5 AI Red Team, and F5 AI Remediate, gives enterprises a closed-loop security model that can keep pace with AI-driven threats in a way no point product can. The path from AI vulnerability discovery to deployable protection is substantially shortened—with adversarial insights automatically turned into enforceable protections to efficiently reduce AI risks.
A unified platform for addressing today’s threat landscape
What excites me about joining F5 is the chance to help customers tackle the massive challenges they face head-on. F5 ADSP isn't just another solution—it's the convergence of high-performance application delivery, comprehensive security, and intelligent automation into i a single platform. It's a direct answer to the pressures that are keeping enterprise leaders up at night.
Consistent policies. Unified visibility. The freedom to deploy anywhere. This is how organizations break free from complexity—and finally unlock the real promise of AI.
Most of the market hasn't heard this story yet. I can't wait to help tell it.
To learn more, I encourage you to check out our F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform webpage.
About the Author
Nirav Shah is the Senior Vice President and Head of Products and Solution Marketing at F5, where he leads the strategic direction for Application Security and AI Security. Before joining F5, he spent eleven years at Fortinet in several leadership positions, most notably heading the AI-Powered SASE, SOC, and Secure Networking solutions. His extensive background also includes significant roles at Cisco Systems, where he spearheaded major initiatives for SD-WAN. With more than two decades of experience in the cybersecurity sector, he has an established record of launching market-defining products and building high-performance teams that align product development with sales and marketing for maximum impact. As a thought leader and USC alumnus, he is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and a regular contributor to leading publications on the intersection of AI and cybersecurity, while remaining dedicated to mentoring emerging cybersecurity professionals.
More blogs by Nirav ShahRelated Blog Posts
The patch window has closed. Here is how F5 is built for what comes next.
As AI models have changed software security, the industry needs to adapt.
Responsible AI: Guardrails align innovation with ethics
AI innovation moves fast. But without the right guardrails, speed can come at the cost of trust, accountability, and long-term value.
Best practices for optimizing AI infrastructure at scale
Optimizing AI infrastructure isn’t about chasing peak performance benchmarks. It’s about designing for stability, resiliency, security, and operational clarity
Datos Insights: Securing APIs and multicloud in financial services
New threat analysis from Datos Insights highlights actionable recommendations for API and web application security in the financial services sector
Secrets to scaling AI-ready, secure SaaS
Learn how secure SaaS scales with application delivery, security, observability, and XOps.
How AI inference changes application delivery
Learn how AI inference reshapes application delivery by redefining performance, availability, and reliability, and why traditional approaches no longer suffice.