How F5 is using AI to solve customer challenges
AI offers the ability to reduce customer friction and automate complex tasks, simplifying application delivery and security. F5 has built an AI Center of Excellence that includes engineers, researchers, and architects to improve AI knowledge across the company. This centralized approach, combined with the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform (ADSP), ensures consistency across the entire solution portfolio.
In collaboration with the AI Center of Excellence, F5 product teams are developing AI capabilities across four key areas, each designed to address specific customer challenges while leveraging shared infrastructure and expertise to maintain consistency and quality.
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AI Assistant
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Code generation
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Threat Detection
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Analytics
- F5 AI Assistant delivers expert, context-aware guidance across application delivery and security workflows. It’s purpose-built for the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform with continuous updates to ensure accurate insights.
- Recommendations from AI Assistant help users navigate complex configurations and troubleshooting scenarios. Because it understands the specific environment and use case, AI Assistant can provide relevant and actionable guidance that reduces the learning curve for F5 products.
- Built on a modular foundation, AI Assistant can be deployed quickly across multiple F5 products and services. This scalable approach enables F5 to quickly extend AI capabilities while maintaining consistency across the solution portfolio.
- Generative AI models are frequently used as coding assistants, and major companies have stated that as much as 30% of their code is written by AI.
- F5 is leveraging AI’s coding capabilities to make it easier to program BIG-IP with F5 AI Assistant. By refining the AI system to work with F5 solutions, users can describe their desired functionality in natural language, and AI generates the corresponding code for BIG-IP via iRules. This means users don’t need to know the TCL programming language, dramatically reducing the time and skills required to implement advanced traffic management logic.
- AI models used for coding can also analyze existing iRules. Many customers have inherited legacy iRules and don’t know what they do or how they do it. AI can analyze and explain these iRules to help customers understand their function and how to update them safely.
- Machine learning models and generative AI models are being developed to assist product developers in refining the signatures used for threat detection in WAF and API protection solutions. AI can enhance traditional detection signatures or potentially replace them in the future.
- F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defense uses AI to identify potential anomalies across user traffic and client-side signals. F5 threat specialists review these alerts and determine if any blocking rules need to be modified or added to protect against malicious bots and attacker retooling. AI is one of many tools that F5 threat specialists use to identify potential threats that might bypass conventional rule-based systems.
- AI systems have the ability to analyze hundreds of daily security alerts to identify the most critical threats and create prioritized task lists for security teams. Rather than forcing administrators to manually sift through overwhelming alert volumes, these intelligent systems understand infrastructure context and current threat landscapes to focus human attention where it's needed most.
- F5 recently announced the acquisition of Fletch, a cybersecurity innovator that turns external threat intel and internal logs into real-time, prioritized insights. Integrating these capabilities into the F5 ADSP will help security teams focus on the most important threats to their organization.
- Agentic AI capabilities are being developed that can proactively recommend high-priority security and performance issues to address. In this way, agents can help reduce alert noise and focus users on the most critical next steps.
By centralizing AI expertise across the organization, F5 ensures that customers benefit from consistent, intelligent AI capabilities in the F5 ADSP. This coordinated strategy allows F5 to reduce operational complexity, improve protection, and provide proactive insights that help customers focus on their core business objectives. As these AI capabilities continue to evolve, customers can expect an increasingly seamless and simplified experience for faster, more secure, and scalable outcomes.
Read more about the benefits of F5 AI Assistant at f5.com/products/ai-assistant.