F5’s AI Investments Are Reducing Toil, Enhancing Security, and More
At F5, our continued investment in artificial intelligence is already delivering real value for both our customers and our employees. A major focus of our AI initiative is reducing customer toil—the repetitive, manual work that creates friction and slows productivity—helping security teams keep up with the increasing threats and application complexity without having to add more staff.
Common examples of such toil include tuning policies at scale, reviewing log data, responding to alerts that could be resolved automatically, or repeatedly writing standard code snippets and configuration files.
To systematically address toil—and simultaneously elevate our security posture—we’ve concentrated our AI investments in four core product areas:
- The F5 AI Assistant across the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform. We’ve expanded our AI Assistant from individual solutions—including F5 Distributed Cloud and F5 NGINX One—to span the entire F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform. (Check out today's blog post on our new platform-wide F5 AI Assistant.)
The F5 AI Assistant helps DevOps, NetOps, and SecOps teams streamline workflows, navigate configurations more efficiently, and obtain contextual recommendations and guided remediation. It’s a powerful tool to reduce complexity in hybrid and multicloud environments—and, of course, to cut down on toil.
- Smarter threat detection. Generative AI and machine learning are transforming threat detection by refining the signatures used to identify threats like API attacks, malicious bots, and complex multi-step exploits. These technologies enable enhanced precision and faster identification of novel or evasive threats, improving traditional methods and advancing defense-in-depth strategies to meet the challenges of today’s evolving threat landscape.
- Accelerated code generation. Generative AI is remarkably effective at writing high-quality, relevant code. One example: our new iRules code generation functionality within the F5 AI Assistant serving F5 BIG-IP customers. (Read this solution overview for details.)
This capability uses AI to dramatically simplify the process of creating and explaining iRules, cutting manual effort and accelerating time to value. The code generation system leverages F5’s deep domain expertise. And this is just the start—we’ll be expanding code generation across other F5 products to unlock even more efficiencies.
- Targeted alerts and analytics. We're advancing our investment in agentic AI to help security teams operate with greater speed, focus, and impact. Our recent acquisition of Fletch—a company that leverages agentic AI to distill vast amounts of cybersecurity data into clear, prioritized insights—accelerates this vision.
Agentic AI can analyze and correlate thousands of daily alerts across data sources, automatically surfacing the most critical threats. This reduces alert fatigue, improves response times, and empowers teams to be proactive rather than reactive.
We're embedding these capabilities into the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform to help security professionals stay ahead of evolving threats—focusing their expertise where it matters most, not on filtering noise. For more information on our acquisition of Fletch, read this previous post.
Empowering engineers through the F5 AI Data Fabric
We're also using AI across our engineering teams through the F5 AI Data Fabric—a system we introduced in early 2024 to harness the power of generative AI. It helps automate tasks like labeling training datasets and enables engineers, data scientists, and even non-technical experts to build, train, and deploy machine learning models securely.
A key innovation is our use of synthetic data—artificially generated data that mirrors the statistical properties of real-world datasets. This allows us to safely create large volumes of high-quality training data, accelerating machine learning development without exposing actual customer data. (For more information on synthetic data, see this recent post.)
We've also modularized and automated these capabilities through a published SDK, making functions like model training, deployment, and data processing easy to access and integrate. By abstracting away the complexity, the AI Data Fabric democratizes AI at F5—enabling product teams to leverage machine learning without deep expertise in data science.
Keeping AI applications secure with the F5 AI Gateway
F5 AI Gateway protects, accelerates, and observes AI-powered applications—representing a natural evolution of our application delivery and security capabilities.
Designed for today’s hybrid multicloud environments, it can be deployed as a standalone solution or integrated with existing F5 software, hardware, or services.
At its core, AI Gateway is a policy orchestration engine: a mix of model- and pattern-based processors that inspect prompts between users and large language models (LLMs) to detect threats like prompt injection and other emerging AI-specific attacks. As with any AI-focused or security solution today, it must evolve to meet ever-changing needs and threats.
In building new capabilities, our developers are leveraging the F5 AI Data Fabric to simplify the training and deployment of machine learning models. This is a strong example of how a common AI infrastructure accelerates innovation across product teams, allowing them to focus on delivering targeted, AI-driven functionality.
Establishing best practices and more with the F5 AI Center of Excellence
The F5 AI Center of Excellence, instituted at F5 in February 2025, is a centralized team of AI engineers, researchers, and architects focused on scaling AI across the company—and I’m proud to lead it. We define best practices, build shared infrastructure, and partner with product teams to align and accelerate AI initiatives.
Using our F5 AI Data Fabric, we streamline the full AI lifecycle—from data collection to deployment of containerized models and AI apps—enabling faster integration of AI into F5 products.
Our Center of Excellence not only provides hands-on expertise but also empowers teams to become self-sufficient with shared tools, reusable code, and guidance throughout their AI journey. Talent development is a key priority as well, helping to upskill teams across F5 in a competitive AI talent market.
Interested in learning more? We hope you’ll check out all of this week’s F5 AI news on our Accelerate AI webpage.