AI at the Edge: What the C-Suite Needs to Know Now

The CDN was built for a different era. AI workloads are multimodal, non-deterministic, and expensive to run. Every round-trip to a centralized data center costs you time, money, and user trust.

In partnership with CIO.com, Simon Wistow (co-founder of Fastly) and Andrew Spaulding (Head of Customer Engineering at Google Cloud) unpack how the programmable edge is becoming the backbone for organizations in the agentic era.

What you'll learn:

• AI outputs are unpredictable. Generative interfaces change with every interaction, and your edge needs to process complex data close to the user without routing everything back to a central data center.

• LLM costs add up fast. Semantic caching at the edge can recognize that similar natural language queries are the same request, serving a cached answer instead of paying for a new inference.

• Data center security models are outdated. Moving WAF and bot protection to the edge neutralizes malicious traffic before it reaches your origin servers.

• Agentic commerce is coming. AI agents that browse, plan, and buy on behalf of users require new interfaces and protocols that will reshape ecommerce.

• Publishers are fighting back. Edge logic and standards like "Really Simple Licensing" let content owners control how AI crawlers access their data.

Watch the on-demand webcast now.