Agents in Production Need a Named Accountable Owner | A Full Sponsor Brand Briefing at Black Hat USA 2026 with Sean Murphy, Field CISO for North America at F5 | Hosted by Sean Martin

Sean Murphy spent most of the past decade running F5 technology as a customer inside highly regulated environments. He is now about four weeks into the role of Field CISO for North America, and he describes the first month as drinking from a fire hose. Depending on how the math is done, he places F5 among the seven largest cybersecurity companies once BIG-IP is counted as security tooling, with the reasoning running through the CIA triad. Availability is the leg that tends to fall out of the security conversation, and without it there is no resiliency.

What changes for a CISO when AI moves from experimentation into production? Sean Murphy points less at speed on its own and more at what he calls the physics behind it. Anyone can build an agent, and people do, which brings shadow AI along for the ride. Forces multiply across speed and scale until the consequences turn existential for some organizations, and governance and visibility land at the feet of the CISO.

He argues they should not stop there. Sean Murphy wants a gating step that carries a business justification and a named accountable owner for each agent. His concern is less about who owns what an agent is designed to do and more about who answers for what it does outside that intent. Intention, in his framing, is the new frontier and the new perimeter.

What should executive teams understand before approving more agents? Exposure has stopped tracking company size. Adversaries are weaponizing agentic AI, and Sean Murphy describes the curve from vulnerability to exposure to exploit as closed for practical purposes, which removes the hiding places smaller organizations used to count on. Investment in AI innovation needs matching investment in governance and guardrails, or the result surfaces as a data breach or an SEC filing tied to shadow IT and shadow AI.

On the technology side, he points to the F5 Application Delivery and Security Platform watching at the customer edge and the regional edge, where AI logic and risk scoring can delay attempts before they reach customer production environments. That delay gives a security team room to detect, respond, recover, and patch on a compressed timeline instead of an almost instantaneous one. It is also why he favors a platform over a set of niche products, with AI risk scoring, runtime analysis, and behavioral alerting in one place a team is trained on.

Sean Murphy closes with a story from the customer seat, where F5 protections acquired through Silverline and Shape helped him push off automated botnet attacks and keep the business running, before anyone framed that work as AI. Boards are pressing executive teams on why more is not underway, and his answer is assurance built on capability, with enough friction in place to stay out of the headlines.

This is a Brand Briefing. A Brand Briefing is an on-location conversation recorded on site at Black Hat USA 2026, putting a spotlight on the guest and their company and pairing it with the editorial reach of ITSPmagazine. Learn more: https://www.studioc60.com/performance/#briefing

GUEST

Sean Murphy, Field CISO for North America at F5
On LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanmurphy092009/

RESOURCES

Black Hat USA 2026 event coverage: https://www.itspmagazine.com/black-hat-usa-2026-cybersecurity-event-coverage-in-las-vegas
Learn more about F5: https://www.f5.com
F5 AI Security Platform and the SurePath AI acquisition: https://www.f5.com/company/news/press-releases/f5-ai-security-platform-control-enterprise-risk

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KEYWORDS

Sean Murphy, F5, Sean Martin, brand briefing, brand story, brand marketing, marketing podcast, Black Hat USA 2026, field CISO, agentic AI, shadow AI, AI governance, agent accountability, application delivery and security platform, AI risk scoring, web application firewall, board reporting, security leadership