John Maddison

Executive VP & Chief Marketing Officer, F5

Search every verified John Maddison interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. John Maddison, chief product officer and corporate marketing officer at F5, discussed the company’s evolving role in AI and security during two recent interviews. In a Google Cloud Partner AI Series conversation, he described F5’s shift from application delivery and load balancing toward cloud-native offerings and noted that the F5 data plane, a layer-seven reverse proxy, could function as a “token engine” for AI models. He stated that “AI increases the attack surface” and that “the ability to do AI data delivery” is becoming critical for training and inference. Maddison also said F5 values working with Google Cloud because of its openness to customer choice. In a separate ZKast interview, Maddison outlined F5’s AI strategy, including the introduction of an AI Assistant with “explain” and “generate” capabilities, such as iRules code generation. He said that “AI ops has arrived” and that AI will serve as a new control plane for operations. Maddison added that F5 is embedding AI into its products for security purposes while also developing security for AI, including protecting APIs, managing data ingestion, and using an AI gateway to safeguard models.