Akamai at Citi’s 2025 Global TMT Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Thursday, 04 September 2025, Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ:AKAM) presented at Citi’s 2025 Global TMT Conference, offering a strategic overview of its business performance and future direction. The company highlighted its growth in cloud infrastructure and security services, while addressing challenges in its delivery services. CEO Tom Leighton emphasized Akamai’s focus on revitalizing growth areas and executing strategic shifts to enhance its market position.

Key Takeaways

• Akamai’s cloud infrastructure services are projected to grow 40% to 45% this year in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).
• Security services, including API Security and Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, are expected to achieve 30% to 35% ARR growth.
• The company is investing in its compute business, notably through the Linode acquisition, and aims for a 20% CAGR over the next five years.
• Akamai is transitioning to a less capital-intensive model, with significant cost savings from insourcing hyperscaler spend.
• Delivery services are stabilizing, with improved pricing and traffic levels.

Financial Results

• Cloud Infrastructure Services ended last year with approximately $250 million ARR and are set for 40%-45% growth.
• Security services also reached around $250 million ARR last year, with a 30%-35% growth target.
• Akamai has reduced Delivery CapEx from 9% to 4% of revenue.
• Insourcing hyperscaler spend is saving the company over $100 million annually.

Operational Updates

• The Linode acquisition has expanded Akamai’s compute business footprint to 36 cities, enhancing scalability and reliability.
• The company is phasing out legacy compute solutions to focus on cloud infrastructure services.
• New security capabilities, such as Firewall for AI, are in development, and recent acquisitions like No Name and Guardicore are proving beneficial.
• Akamai’s go-to-market strategy is evolving with increased focus on specialist support and longer contract lengths.

Future Outlook

• The compute business is expected to become a majority contributor early next year, with potential reporting changes to emphasize Cloud Infrastructure Services growth.
• AI and generative AI are anticipated to drive further traffic growth.
• Akamai is aiming for structural changes in capital intensity, aligning with higher-margin workloads.

Q&A Highlights

• The delivery business is seeing less irrational market behavior, with traffic volumes improving.
• Akamai is not experiencing significant delivery revenue loss to hyperscalers offering free delivery services.

For a detailed understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Citi’s 2025 Global TMT Conference:

Unidentified speaker: Siri, and I’m really excited to be hosting Akamai Technologies, CEO and founder, Tom Leighton. Thank you so much for being here.

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Oh, thank you.

Unidentified speaker: I think we have a lot of ground to cover, so I’m going to jump right into it. I think a good place to start would be just to kind of take stock of the year in terms of Akamai’s business performance, specifically around you all taking some very strategic and necessary steps to revitalize certain growth areas and refocus the business to higher growth areas. Just from that perspective, if you can talk to us about key achievements over the course of the year and, more specifically, around some of the financial and business targets and goals that you also shared about six months ago.

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Yeah, we’ve had a good year, good year for execution, getting ahead of plan and where we started the year, raised full year guidance on top and bottom line on the last call. Really excited about our cloud infrastructure services. You know, that ended last year with an ARR of about $250 million, and we’re on target to deliver 40% to 45% growth there this year. That has just a really bright future. It’s a huge market. Akamai is differentiated in our distributed approach to get the business logic closer to end users, which gives better performance and also a lower cost given the extensive nature of our platform. Very excited to see that. Security performing well, especially with our API Security and Akamai Guardicore Segmentation solutions.

We ended last year combined, they were about $250 million, and we’re on track this year in ARR to grow that 30% to 35%, which is really exciting to see. We just released a new product, Firewall for AI. Very early days, but a lot of customer interest there. Everybody’s deploying all sorts of agents and AI apps, and they need specialized security. AI is a great tool, but it’s a huge vulnerability. It’s something that has access to all of your data, is speaking to the public. It’s not deterministic like a normal application. You never really know what it’s going to do. There have already been some pretty bad headlines for companies that got burned there. Very excited about that. Delivery is stabilizing, which I think is a relief to a lot of folks to see that.

Last year was not a good year, but doing much better at this point. I think the prospects are good going forward there. Overall, we’ve been very pleased with the developments this year in the execution.

Unidentified speaker: Because you brought up delivery, I’d love to peel back the onion on that a little bit. As you said, the last couple of years, there’s been quite a high degree of variability in that franchise for you. Of late, there has been a much greater degree of stability. The recovery we’ve seen in that business, how sustainable is that recovery? Just to bring it down to more tangible drivers of what’s going to ensure that the business continues to stay more stable rather than have maybe more of the erratic growth patterns that we saw more recently.

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Yeah, I think the delivery marketplace was impacted by a bunch of companies that were selling below cost. We have the best cost basis in the business. We’re the biggest and best by a good margin, but it’s not helpful when there’s competitors out there that are doing anything to get some revenue.

Unidentified speaker: On a dollar for $0.90.

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Exactly. Doing it at scale. Now, four of them went broke for the obvious, obvious reasons. There’s still a couple of players doing that, but a lot less than there were before. The market is still very competitive, but not nearly like it was before. Traffic levels are picking back up as well. That’s a good combination. I’m optimistic that going forward, it will be a much better situation.

Unidentified speaker: I know Ed McGowan and I have talked about this offline. At the risk of being over-simplistic, you know, the delivery business has just been a product of pricing and volume, right? You sort of alluded to pricing being far less irrational. I’m not going to say pricing is rational. It’s far less irrational. I think that is easy to appreciate. On the volume side, you did speak to the traffic volumes picking up a little bit. To what would you attribute that recovery in traffic, especially in the absence of new content releases and OTT launches? I know there’s a hit-driven component to some of the gaming side, but would love to get a little bit more granular on the V side of the P times V equation for delivery.

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Great point. Traffic growth is not like it was back in a time where there were a lot of new OTT providers or early days of COVID where everybody’s locked up inside. It’s not at that level and doesn’t need to be for us to have a good business there. The improvements in traffic we’re seeing is really pretty much across the board. No one sector you’d point to, which is also good to see. I think we’re at probably more of the new normal at this point, and there are potential drivers that could take it up further. If we start doing a lot of video associated with generative AI, how the web changes, how we interact with it, text doesn’t drive a lot of traffic, but anything with video, if we start wearing headsets a lot of the time, that drives a lot of traffic.

There are potentials for more. Of course, we always like to have better quality on our videos, and better quality means a lot more traffic. That’s helpful.

Unidentified speaker: You brought up AI, and it begs the question, could that potentially be a very strong force in creating an inflection point in growth for internet traffic, especially for consumer applications? I think there’s somewhere 80 to 85% of generative AI traffic is geared towards consumer applications, which kind of interestingly dovetails with the delivery business. We can naturally talk about the compute business. Just curious what you think the further democratization and mainstreaming of AI and consumer-facing generative AI applications is going to do to traffic volumes over time.

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: I think it helps. The question is how much, you know, if we move into a new world of the web where it becomes more voice than click, that’s good, because voice drives a lot more traffic than reading the text. If it gets to a world where there’s video, you know, interaction, that what you’re seeing back is a video presentation of some kind, that’s huge. That’s a really wonderful world to be in for content delivery. We do the delivery for, you know, a lot of the entities that would be involved, including one of the largest, you know, generative AI search engines. I think there’s good potential there. It’s early days. Still today, it’s basically text.

Unidentified speaker: Just to, you know, kind of put the delivery conversation to bed, the business is declining less. What is it going to take for the business to actually get to a path where it’s not in an ex-growth mode?

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: It’s a little bit better on the pricing stabilization and decent traffic levels. If something does turn, you know, and generates a lot more traffic, that’s a huge win.

Unidentified speaker: Large customers and how they’ve been behaving vis-a-vis insourcing, you know, some of the delivery capabilities, how far down the path are we that, hey, the largest customers for whom it makes ROI sense to do delivery on their own, you know, have we run the course on that, you know, what are the risks of more customers incrementally shifting more volumes to a DIY approach and more of a multi-CDN vendor management approach?

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Yeah, pretty much. I think all the big guys that would do it have done it. I think all the big guys do have some kind of multi-vendor. In fact, some of them may be decreasing the number of vendors, especially with four of the providers gone now. I think, yeah, that’s a factor, but I don’t see it’s really changing at this point. Now you ask, okay, who does it make sense for? I don’t really think it makes sense for any of them. I think it’s better. We provide a better capability at a lower price point, but some of them just think it’s important for them to have that capability.

Unidentified speaker: Tom, you and the management team have worked really hard to take Akamai from a 60% delivery business to a 60% compute and security business, which have the higher horsepower and torque in terms of growth. With that in mind, let’s talk a little bit about security, the broader strategy there and the insights you can offer us at a portfolio and SKU level, because underneath the hood, you’ve got multiple enterprise-grade security capabilities, but they have wildly different growth profiles. Just from a broader portfolio strategy perspective, how are you thinking about security, and how we should internalize some of the product level growth?

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Yeah, you know, we’ve made a lot of progress in security. It’s now the majority, over half of our revenue is just security. We’re one of the largest security vendors in the world. Not many security companies are over $2 billion in revenue like Akamai, getting good growth. You’re right, there’s a dynamic that some of our products, which are market leading, have a lot of penetration now, so they’re a little bit more mature and they’re going to grow a little slower, you know, going forward. Some of our products are newer, very big markets growing really rapidly. You know, API Security, a lot of potential for continued growth, segmentation, you know, leading products to stop ransomware, you know, so a lot of growth there. I think you’ll see us over time continue to develop new capabilities.

You think about Firewall for AI, that should be very important over time. There’ll be maybe other acquisitions that we do. We’ve been very pleased with the acquisitions of No Name and Guardicore. If we can find the right next, you know, company like that, that’s reasonably priced, which is hard in this market, yeah, we would do that and increase the amount that we can provide our customers and strengthen the security platform that we sell and the growth.

Unidentified speaker: Is there a white space in the security portfolio that would behoove you to be more assertive and aggressive on M&A? I appreciate that you are going to be very particular about the valuation context and all those things. Any specific areas of interest or opportunity, again, within the security portfolio that would be more accretive to the overall platform?

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Generally, our strategy is to look for capabilities that are close enough to what we do that it makes sense to package as a platform, that we know the buyer, that we can be successful in selling it and really growing it. You know, durable long-term growth. Those are the areas that we look at for security.

Unidentified speaker: How are you positioning yourself both from a brand recognition perspective, but also from a go-to-market perspective within the cybersecurity proper arena? There are, you know, mammoth forces in that space in and of its own right. How are you ensuring you have the brand recognition? Maybe the companion question to that is how much of your penetration of security capabilities within, you know, your customer base is predominantly, you know, an add-on for your very large delivery customers that, you know, essentially are glomming on to security as an adjacent functionality on top of their delivery?

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: For our major verticals in security, you say led by financial vertical, they all know who we are. You go to any bank, financial institution, CISO, we’re one of their largest vendors, two or three, sometimes largest for security. We have pretty good brand recognition there. Now as we grow the portfolio, we would increase marketing for certain capabilities, but the buyers know us today in security.

Unidentified speaker: From a KPI perspective, what are you tracking vis-a-vis demand generation, vis-a-vis, you know, there are certain episodic dynamics around, hey, ransomware attacks are through the roof or zero-day attack volumes are through the roof. I guess this particularly pertains or would pertain to the DDoS business, right? Are there any particular KPIs or macro drivers that you feel the security business is maybe more sensitive to, both on the up and down? How do you mitigate some of that in the context of having a more durable and higher growth in the security business?

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Yeah, showing the value is really important in security. Now our most motivated buyer is somebody who just got hacked, or even better if it’s the next door neighbor of somebody who just got hacked. You do see episodic buying patterns sometimes. You know, what was it, six to nine months ago with Killnet, you know, and they went after hospitals and organizations that just had never really thought about it. That in a sense drove a lot of business our way because we had the leading solutions to stop the denial of service attacks. Hadn’t really done business with those companies before because they didn’t think they needed a solution. Now they know they do, and that can drive an uptick in the business.

Ransomware, yeah, that’s why you’re seeing such spectacular growth, you know, with our segmentation because a lot more industries realize, oh my goodness, they need a solution and we have the best one. In peacetime, if you will, in a sector with a company, it’s important to keep showing the value of what we’re providing to them and making sure they understand what’s going to happen to them and the cost if they don’t have defenses.

Unidentified speaker: I want to shift gears to the compute business. You know, this entire franchise got a nice turbo boost and shot in the arm with the acquisition of Linode. You’ve really built organically upon that acquisition with more CapEx and infrastructure-oriented investments, really building that out. There have been very, very big changes in this segment and in this offering, both from a product and capability standpoint, but also from a messaging standpoint, and then naturally also from a go-to-market perspective. We’ve come a long way, but I think a recap would be very helpful, especially in the context of you shedding and rationalizing some low ROI areas within that portfolio. We’d love to have you spend a little bit of time talking about the evolution and the ongoing evolution of the compute franchise.

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Yeah, that’s a really important question. The Linode acquisition was transformational for us, and we put a huge amount of investment into it, not just on the capital increase in size or increase in footprint. We’re now in 36 cities, a whole new architecture, much more scalable, much more reliable. We can get various accreditations for it, more functionality. We’re building out an ecosystem of partners. We have pretty much a full stack media workflow to compete with the hyperscalers there. A lot of investment and growth is captured in our cloud infrastructure services, which we call revenue, which is stuff that really comes from Linode and our edge computing, our JavaScript function as a service. We’re just now going live with our managed containers service. We can take customer containers and support it in any of our edge regions.

We got the first few customers now that are running containers in 150 cities, and we can scale that to 750. In fact, one of the first big users is a hyperscaler because we can get their containers in more cities than they can. That is our future in compute. We had legacy solutions that we developed for customers that did compute in our platform, but not in the way you’d think of as a hyperscaler doing it. Some of those, yeah, we’re phasing some of those out because they don’t make sense for us to invest in going forward. Probably next year, maybe when we talk about compute for the year, we’re really just focused on cloud infrastructure services. It’s where all our investments are going and where all the growth is. I think a very exciting trajectory.

Unidentified speaker: You talked about a 40% to 45% ARR growth aspiration for CIS in particular this year. What does that actually assume, and what gives you the confidence that this is the right zip code of output that you can achieve? As in, what are you seeing in your customer base from a behavioral workload migration to Akamai’s footprint standpoint that’s giving you this confidence that it’s going to grow at this hyper growth rate, which is orders of magnitude above company level?

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: For this year, it’s contracts. At this point, pretty much the revenue we’re going to be getting in Q4, we have a very good, solid understanding of. Maybe something moves a month or two, crossing into next year, but basically that is pretty well understood. Longer term, as we think about it, we think we have a compelling value proposition in an enormous market. We can provide better performance, and a bunch of the apps need that. A bunch of the apps out there that customers want their compute logic close to users, so the user gets a better experience. AI is a tailwind there for apps where you want to talk to the thing, chatbots, inference engines, buying decisions get made based on that. Latency is really important in that context.

We can do it at a lower price point because we have the world’s most distributed and, I think, efficient platform, and so particularly for applications where there’s a lot of data moving around, very expensive to use the hyperscalers. We can provide a lower price point. In today’s world, if you can cut your cloud bill in half, that’s a big deal.

Unidentified speaker: Hard dollar savings. You know, bridging this back to your 20% CAGR aspirations over the next five years for the compute franchise, you’re going to exit at ideally 45% or higher this year, decelerating to 20%. What does that imply? How?

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Yeah, so that’s the thing is, you know, the compute number when we talked about it, is two pieces. Cloud infrastructure services, which is, you know, doing fabulous, and our legacy compute applications, some of which we’re deprecating or handing over to partners who then migrate to our cloud platform. That legacy part, think of it as flattish. You got the part that’s really booming. The booming part is going to cross over and be the majority early next year. You know, that’s how you get this as 40 and then the whole thing being, say, 20 over the longer term. Probably we’re going to, you know, change, maybe we’ll change how we report, you know, next year that says, look, let’s just focus on the part where we’re investing in and it’s growing. That’s the bigger number.

Unidentified speaker: One of the other elements that I wanted to discuss with you is the interplay or the necessary interplay between CIS and delivery in that, you know, by and large, a lot of the CI, the visibility that you have in CIS momentum and workload migration to your edge, is coming from your delivery customers, right? To ask the question more bluntly, are you seeing a little bit of a shifting of the deck chairs in terms of what would have been delivery revenue is being maybe captured in CIS revenue? How should we disabuse investors of the notion that this would have been maybe categorized as delivery revenue and maybe delivery is ending up being a loss-leading mechanism to drive more CIS workload growth? How should we disabuse us of that notion that that is not the correct interpretation?

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: That’s not what’s happening. You know, for example, some of the hyperscalers sometimes will say, hey, buy our compute, delivery is free. Sometimes they’ll do that, and that’s because compute is worth 10 times as much. Now we would do the same thing. There’s been a couple of times we’ve offered to do that. It hasn’t happened, because the compute is 10 times the delivery. That’s a slam dunk and probably higher margin. That’s not a factor today, you know, in our compute revenue. If we get a new customer in compute, we will pick up delivery and that’ll be allocated to delivery. It turns out that the sweet spot, center of mass in our new compute revenue is big media, and they are big Akamai customers generally for delivery, but they still have the delivery portion separate from the compute portion.

Unidentified speaker: Okay. In terms of driving greater leverage and, again, a return on investment and a return on invested capital on your infrastructure footprint, all of the efforts around scaling the compute business would, you know, downstream have very favorable leverage impacts, right? Because the value of that workload is significantly greater than, all things being equal, a delivery workload being run at the edge, right? I think you’ve been very candid about that. Just from a compute-related ROI perspective, what does that algorithm look like versus if you were only just, you know, back in the day, just running, you know, delivery, right? What does that look like?

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Yeah, so very, very roughly, you know, a dollar of compute CapEx, you know, when we are selling our infrastructure as a service or a partner service, is a dollar a year of revenue. We’re amortizing now over a six-year period, so very attractive economics. Some of the investment initially we made was for our internal uses. There we don’t, you know, bill ourselves, but it does greatly reduce what we were paying the hyperscalers.

Unidentified speaker: This was the program that you undertook where it was roughly $100 million of hyperscaler spend that you effectively insourced to drink your own champagne, as they say.

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Yeah. In fact, you know, today, if we hadn’t done that, it’d be a lot more than $100 million we’re saving.

Unidentified speaker: The one-to-one ratio is the right way to think about it.

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Approximately, maybe storage a little bit less, but ballpark, a dollar of CapEx is a dollar a year of revenue, very, very roughly.

Unidentified speaker: I know a lot of investors who’ve been familiar with you have realized you do have a very capital-intensive business, especially when traffic volumes for delivery purposes are going through the roof, supporting new launches and things like that. As you pivot to more of these higher margin workload and use cases, right? How does that change the structural capital intensity of the business going forward? I.e., do you go from becoming a high teens, 20%+ CapEx player to low teens? And how long does that take to transpire?

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Yeah, great question. First, with CapEx, most, but not all, is the deployed network. We have software, capitalization, other kinds of things, infrastructure that would go into capitalization. Delivery used to be pretty intensive, but we’ve cut it in about half. The delivery business used to be about 9% of revenue, and that’s down now to 4%. Of course, we’ve changed our strategy there. There’s a little bit less traffic growth, which helps. We’re always working to make our platform more efficient in terms of its delivery capabilities. We’re not going after the huge spiky crowd kinds of things where you have to do a lot of build-out. We’re not taking the super low-priced business, which is a lot of build-out, but not enough revenue. The capital intensity is cut in half. Security, not so capitally intensive, so not an issue.

Compute is capitally intensive as we’re growing, and the faster we grow, the more it shows up in CapEx, certainly as a percentage of revenue. That’s a good thing. We want to grow fast. If you’re growing really fast and you’re going to add a lot of revenue next year, you have to build out the CapEx to support that revenue. Over the long haul, that’s a very attractive proposition on the P&L. Today, you’re right. We’re in the high teens when you put all those things together. It depends on the mix going forward and how fast compute grows. I want to have a problem where I come back and say, wow, compute’s doing even better. We’re going to put more CapEx in to fuel that. I think investors will be very happy.

Unidentified speaker: What would be the catalyst for that? Is it, you know, you moving into more on the inferencing side at the edge? Is that something that you’re kind of seeing green shoots of in this compute or CIS business in particular today? Would that be the telltale sign of, okay, you’re seeing, you know, you’re going to invest ahead of that sort of cresting?

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Yeah, inferencing AI in general is a strong tailwind. You know, it remains to be seen how large, but it looks very promising for us. As we look to the future, more desire to have the workflows be closer to users for performance reasons. You know, we’re in a great position to do that. We’re at the best at being able to do that.

Unidentified speaker: I want to shift gears to operations and then more specifically go-to-market. We talked about the strategy shift at the top end or from a revenue perspective, but you’re making mirroring adjustments on the go-to-market side and, you know, no pain, no gain, right? There has been change in the way the sales organization has been structured and incentivized. I think it would be worthwhile to have you shed light on what has changed, how far down the path are we, what things have you seen that give you encouragement? All of us want results yesterday, right? What’s that timeframe where you feel that the changes are going to be seasoned and you can gain your stride again on the go-to-market side after these changes?

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Yeah, so there’s a lot more focus on hunting because our new products that are growing fast appeal to a broader set of verticals than we had. A lot of opportunity in hunting. There’s increased investment in specialists to support the sales of new products. Today, that segmentation, it’s API Security, a few folks around AI, you know, security and compute. In another year or so, we may not need as many of the specialists on API Security, probably fold into the regular field. Maybe there’s new products in security that, you know, those folks would be taking over. Overall, increased investment in go-to-market because we have the products and the greenfield to go after. We’ve made improvements in rep efficiency. Contract lengths are going up in a material way, by design. We’re making good progress now. We’re starting to see some of the benefit.

This will be work that we continue certainly through the end of this year and probably into next year as well. I think we start seeing even more benefits in next year.

Unidentified speaker: Historically, I think some of the changes you’ve made have been more reconstitution or realignment of existing resources. I want to be unambiguous and clear. You are actively increasing the level of investments in terms of headcount added to the sales organization, more quota carrying reps, etc. Is that the right interpretation?

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Yes.

Unidentified speaker: Tom, I’m going to take a step back and ask you a very big picture question. You’ve had a seat in terms of watching pretty massive technology and economic cycles, just having founded the company and being at the bleeding edge of the explosive Web 2.0 era and, you know, where we’re at. I would love for you to give your perspective on how much of what we’re seeing with AI and generative AI today rings alarm bells, but also hearkens back to some of the things you saw when the internet was on the precipice of just absolute explosion.

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Yeah, it is possible that we’re going to see a major transformation in the web and how we use it. That’ll be a pretty fundamental transition that, you know, instead of the model of, you know, clicking onto something or interacting with an app, you know, we’ll be doing it in language, even better for us if it’s video. You know, there’s already new protocols for the models to talk to each other and share data, with an agentic AI that you would ask your device to set up something for you. It would go out and deal with all the entities out there to do it. It would be smart enough to know how to do that, what you want, and it would produce the result. That’s really a different kind of world than today when you want to do something or buy something or reserve something.

You’re doing a lot of that yourself in clicking or tapping on your device. That world may fundamentally change, which is a pretty cool concept. That’ll create a huge demand for the compute around all that because it is compute intensive. It does create massive security, new security issues, which happened with the original web. Everybody raced to adopt it, got great benefits from it, and just massive security loopholes and challenges that we’re still suffering from today. The security challenges are going to get bigger when we do that. The AI is fundamentally different. With the big enterprise codes and app today, they got good developers. It gets coded. You know what it’s going to do. AI does not work that way at all. It’s much more efficient to create the application, but you watch what it does and it seems like it’s working, but you have no promise.

Unidentified speaker: False positives galore.

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Yeah, you have no idea really that it hallucinates. On top of that, it has access to all your sensitive data and it’s talking to the outside world. Already you’re seeing some of the exploits there. That’s not a good thing. You have no real control on the insides. Once some data, maybe malicious data, gets in, there’s no way to get it out. There’s nowhere it’s stored. It’s embedded in the billions of variables in the model. You know, you can’t get it out. You know, it’s a totally different underlying world. We’re going to get a lot more efficient, mm-hmm, all across the board, but security is going to be a huge, huge challenge.

Unidentified speaker: Fair enough. I think my last question for you is, you’ve had the opportunity to see a lot of investors today and possibly even yesterday. What is the single most prominent and most salient misunderstanding or misperception that you’re finding investors are running into with the Akamai story?

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Yeah, it’s a great question. In fact, we did an investor survey recently because the one common theme is, wow, you’re undervalued. We are, you know, and I bought stock.

Unidentified speaker: I was going to say, you’re putting your money where your mouth is.

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Yeah, our Board Chairman bought stock. I don’t know if he’s ever done that before. The company bought back a lot of stock. Maybe, you know, the concerns were, you know, we had a delivery was tough last year. That is stabilizing. Security, we have a fabulous security business. The majority of our revenue, good growth, market-leading products, and compute. I guess the question people have is, is that real? Mm-hmm. You know, is that really going to, yes, it’s real. We’re looking at ways, some of the advice we got from investors in the survey was how we position ourselves and explain it. You know, because you think about, wow, our cloud infrastructure services, a quarter billion, which is not totally trivial last year, growing 40%, and we got a strong trajectory from there.

We just, I think, got to communicate that better and execute and show people, yeah, we’re doing what we said.

Unidentified speaker: Stuff. We’re going to be rooting and watching you from the sidelines.

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Great. Thank you.

Unidentified speaker: Thank you very much. I appreciate your time.

Tom Leighton, CEO and founder, Akamai Technologies: Thank you.

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