Exclusive: Fastly’s Randy Reddig on AI bots and disruption

During Sydney's Fastly Xcelerate 2025, Randy Reddig stressed that AI bots are not just disrupting media, but also reshaping the web and forcing companies to rethink security.

TechDay sat down with Reddig, Interim Chief Product Officer at Fastly, to talk about how artificial intelligence is reshaping the internet.

"The explosive growth of AI bots is unlike anything we've seen," Reddig said. He pointed to Fastly's threat insights report showing the dominance of one player in particular.

"Meta represents 52% of the traffic on one dimension that we see, dwarfing both OpenAI and others cumulatively. It's pretty remarkable to watch, frankly."

Generative worlds on the fly

Reddig said the speed of progress in generative AI has stunned even seasoned engineers. "A couple of weeks ago, five or six different companies released new versions of their models on the same day," he explained.

He described new models from Google that can generate scenes and environments in real time. "Historically, you would require a triple-A game developer with multi-million-dollar investment to build out these worlds. Now you have a model generating them on the fly in response to user input," he said.

The possibilities, he added, stretch into sport and entertainment.

"I can imagine fully synthetic, real-time professional sports events that never happened and seem to be happening live."

The rise of 'zero click'

For publishers and media companies, the shift is existential.

"What we're seeing now is this zero click phenomenon where a user might get a response generated by ChatGPT or Claude and never actually go to the canonical, authoritative source," Reddig explained.

"If you're a publisher or media company relying on ad revenue or direct visits, this is incredibly disruptive."

Fastly's answer is to give its customers more control at the edge.

"The edge is the best place to do that, because our platform sits between crawlers and consumers, protecting our customers' origins," he said.

Innovation with risks attached

Reddig was clear-eyed about the dangers of autonomous AI bots. He singled out the Model Context Protocol - a simple but powerful way for AI to connect to tools and other models.

"The challenge is it mixes context with secrets or instructions. Prompt injection can expose private or sensitive information in ways the builders never imagined," he said.

That's why Fastly is doubling down on secure execution.

"We can run customer programs anywhere in the world in microseconds, process a request securely, and then dispose of all that context. That ensures safety and privacy," he explained.

Finding balance

For Reddig, the challenge is to give customers personalisation without compromising trust. "A platform like ours is naturally suited to executing agentic workflows in a secure sandbox environment that limits access to data," he said.

"It's about giving customers the outcomes they want without exposing them to unnecessary risks."

And he insists the customer always comes first. "I wake up every day thinking about how we can give our customers more value for less time," he said.

What good AI looks like

When asked what will define best-in-class AI in the coming year, Reddig pointed to accountability. "You see companies like Apple moving model execution onto devices that are accountable to the user. That notion of accountability and ownership is really important," he said.

The upside for developers, he added, is enormous. "One of our engineers said one of the virtues of AI is better mental health. It frees developers from drudgery and lets them engage their executive thinking. You're working with these tools almost as partners."

Advice from the edge

For businesses wondering if they're behind, Reddig urged patience. "This is brand new. We're still in the wild frontier of what's possible," he said.

He argued that technology always makes the impossible possible. "Things that were impossible before and had infinite cost are now merely expensive. Technology enables better outcomes that simply weren't possible before."

His closing message was simple: stay focused on your customers.

"Companies that are truly building useful products will find AI and agentic tools to be a valuable component, just like adding the internet or mobile apps," he said.

And despite the turbulence, Reddig remains optimistic. "New innovation always creates disruption, but I think we'll find our feet again. I'm really curious to see what the new normal will be," he said.