AI is moving into production faster than most security teams can govern it. In this episode, F5’s Shawn Womke and WWT’s Chris Konrad break down why enterprises are unintentionally deploying “naked AI” — systems running without adequate data controls, API protection, or governance. Drawing on new F5 research, they explain why only 2% of organizations are truly AI-ready, how shadow AI and exposed interfaces are expanding risk, and why trust must be designed into the AI lifecycle before autonomy — and quantum threats — arrive.

Support for this episode provided by: Red Hat

More about this week's guests:

Chris Konrad is a global cybersecurity executive and Vice President of Global Cyber at World Wide Technology. Since joining WWT in 2014, he has helped build and scale its $4.5B global security business. Chris leads global cyber strategy, practice development, and partner engagement, aligning security programs to business outcomes across public and private sectors. With 27+ years of experience, he is a trusted advisor to C-suite leaders and a member of the Forbes Technology Council, known for turning cybersecurity into a strategic enabler of resilience and growth.

Chris's top pick: Secure All Together: 5 Principles for Building a Culture of Cybersecurity

Shawn Womke is Senior Vice President of Product Management at F5, leading the strategic direction of a portfolio central to how customers build, secure, and scale modern applications. Since joining F5 in 2013, he has helped deliver products grounded in real-world use cases, from open-source innovation in Kubernetes and OpenStack to leading the Aspen Mesh incubation and serving as General Manager of NGINX. With experience spanning Cisco, startups, and global enterprises, Shawn is focused on uniting teams around clear vision, customer impact, and execution at scale.

Shawn's top pick: Texas A&M University System Teams Up with WWT for Cyber Range Challenge

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions.

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments.