F5ers shaping AI: A Q&A with Mark Toler on securing AI with purpose

F5 Newsroom Staff

As AI becomes foundational to how organizations operate, the work of securing it has never been more important. In this next installment of our Life at F5 Q&A series spotlighting F5ers who are shaping AI, we sit down with Mark Toler, a Product Marketing Manager for AI Security, to talk about impact, storytelling, and what it takes to help organizations adopt AI securely and responsibly.

Q: What first drew you to F5 — and what’s kept you here?

Mark: My career focus has always been impact. My whole life, I wanted to serve, and I spent three years under contract with the U.S. Army in officer training, graduating from Officer Basic at Fort Knox, before that path was cut short by a medical disqualification following a policy change. After that, I had a stint as a professional country music singer. At first glance, those paths might seem disconnected from my current role, but I now realize they both led me to the same place: operating at the intersection of service and storytelling.

AI is an exciting technology with tremendous potential. But without dedicated security, and with bad actors actively looking to exploit its weaknesses, it’s often everyday people who end up paying the price. In my current role as Product Marketing Manager for AI Security, I get to use storytelling for a purpose. Many organizations are still starting from zero when it comes to AI security, so if my work helps drive adoption and awareness, I believe we’re contributing a net positive to the general welfare.

What’s kept me at F5 is the culture. There’s a deeply held belief that a good idea can come from anywhere. I work with F5ers who are far more experienced or smarter than me, but no one plays that card. Ideas are evaluated on their merits, not on where they came from or what’s on someone’s resume.

Q: How would you describe F5’s culture in three words?

Mark: Agility, ownership, and experimentation. F5 empowers people to move quickly and take responsibility for their ideas. It’s a culture where trying new things is encouraged, not penalized.

Q: What does your role at F5 involve, and how does it contribute to F5’s mission?

Mark: As the Product Marketing Manager for AI Security, I own the core messaging and story we take to market for our AI security solutions. My primary focus is our flagship AI security product, F5 AI Guardrails.

Practically speaking, that means a lot of content creation for both internal and external audiences, competitive analysis to understand where we stand compared to other vendors, and close collaboration across product management, sales enablement, field teams, and corporate marketing.

A Product Marketing Manager for AI Security, Mark Toler is shaping the future of AI through storytelling, trust, and impact.

Product marketing is very much a team sport. My role is to gather insights from people across the company—each with their own expertise—and synthesize them into messaging that resonates with customers. The goal is to create those “light bulb” moments where customers realize F5 should be their trusted advisor for AI security.

Q: What excites you most about the role AI plays in shaping the future of F5’s technology?

Mark: I think AI has the potential to be the greatest democratization of knowledge since the advent of the Internet. For people who are curious or ambitious, it accelerates learning, helps validate understanding, and makes it easier to turn ideas into reality.

At the same time, AI is easily exploitable. Without proper security, it can become a vehicle for misinformation, insecure design, and privacy violations. With F5 AI Guardrails, I get to help shape a future where the positive potential of AI is far more common than the negative outcomes.

Q: How is your team using AI to solve challenges or make life easier for customers or employees?

Mark: I trained an AI model for sentiment analysis across our primary customer personas. We call it OTTR, which stands for opinions, trends, tracking, and reporting. Though honestly, I just think otters are cool and wanted the acronym.

Given how fast AI is moving, OTTR has been a really effective way to stay informed about how security practitioners are feeling and where the biggest pain points are emerging. It helps us listen better and respond faster.

Q: What’s one misconception people often have about AI — and what’s the reality from your perspective?

Mark: The biggest misconception is that AI is best used as a substitute rather than a supplement.

Humans have an incredible ability to retrieve relevant context from trillions of memories and experiences—what we often call intuition. AI still struggles to replicate that. Left on its own, AI tends to produce average outputs rather than truly best-in-class work.

If AI is doing 90% of the work and a human is polishing the last 10%, the core output is still average. Where AI really excels today is the inverse: when humans do 90% of the creative or strategic thinking and AI helps smooth the final 10%.

Q: Can you share a moment when AI surprised you or changed how you think about your work?

There have been times when I’ve used AI purely as a brainstorming tool, just to see what it comes back with. And occasionally, it’s genuinely good. That’s pushed me to use AI as a benchmark.

Now I’ll ask myself: Is what I’ve created clearly better than what AI can generate? If not, it’s probably not exceptional enough. AI has made average content more accessible than ever, which raises the bar for doing work that truly stands out.

Q: If you could create an AI to make one part of your life easier, what would it do?

I’d build an AI that chooses someone from my contacts to call during my commute. Staying in touch with people is hard, and it’s tough to keep a mental model of who you haven’t talked to in a while. I’d love an AI that manages the rotation and forces me to make random calls while I’m stuck in traffic.

Building AI with impact and intent

For Mark, shaping the future of AI security at F5 comes down to impact and intent. As AI continues to evolve, what matters most has remained consistent: using storytelling with purpose, working alongside people who value ideas over titles, and building security that helps organizations adopt AI responsibly. That combination is what makes F5 a place where meaningful work — and meaningful progress — happens.

Want to build meaningful technology with people who lead with integrity? Explore open roles at F5.

Stay tuned for our next blog post highlighting F5ers who are shaping AI. Also, be sure to check out the previous blog post in this series:

F5ers shaping AI: A Q&A with Hunter Smit on culture, growth and meaningful work

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F5 Newsroom Staff

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