How Okta has evolved with the AI age

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Identity is a tricky concept. It can encompass personal signifiers, core beliefs, and other distinctive qualities. For an industry-leading identity security company like Okta, it’s much more straightforward: It ensures you are who you say you are when navigating IT infrastructure.

Now, thanks to AI, Okta has built a completely new AI agent product, a response to growing customer demand for nonhuman identity protection. In the days before AI that meant machines or servers; now, it means digital agents.

Here’s how Okta retooled its teams to take advantage of a burgeoning revenue stream.

Problems create opportunities

This year has seen some significant cyberattacks, and agentic AI has raised the stakes further, putting the onus on security leaders to adjust course.

“There’s a whole new landscape and horizon now where agents can be impersonated and can be a new angle for cyberattacks,” said Okta’s President and COO Eric Kelleher.

Kelleher said increased demand for AI products potentially opens the door to threat actors accessing important calendars, documents, and databases.

“Our customers know that they have a huge exposure right now with employees giving agents access to corporate data,” he said.

Okta had a problem to solve for its customers, while engaging in a potentially lucrative business segment. In practice, this meant modifying existing teams and creating new ones dedicated to AI.

“We have several customer advisory boards where we meet with customers to understand what they’re doing and their needs, and that feeds directly into our product planning for our product managers and the road maps that they build,” Kelleher said.

Pushing P(roduct)

These internal changes allowed Okta to develop and sell its latest AI authentication tool, Okta for AI Agents, which was announced just last month. Jack Hirsch, VP of product management, says the tool had a different proposition from identity security for humans.

“The nuances is where it starts to get pretty complex…From a very technical product nitty-gritty [perspective], we’ve had to reshape and rebuild this idea of what it means to be an identity in the platform,” he said.

Hirsch says the advent of model context protocol (MCP) has also been a huge turning point.

“It doesn’t matter whether your agents sit in a platform like Salesforce or even ChatGPT. Where they get really powerful is when those agents connect to other systems, apps, resources,” he said.

For Hirsch, the AI rush has led to an unprecedented demand for Okta’s identity security products. “You’re seeing massive investments,” he said.

He also touched on how the development of AI-focused security tools can potentially benefit companies looking to maximize ROI on AI investments.

“The vast majority of AI projects are failing to see the desired ROI, and much of that is because they run into internal adoption hurdles, security challenges, especially in the enterprise,” Hirsh said. 

Expert insight: creating effective enterprise AI

Justin Rice is chief product and technology officer at AI enterprise solutions company CBTS, another business benefitting from the groundswell of AI opportunity. As demand has skyrocketed, Rice said he and his team have emphasized one thing to every customer: security.

“We have a saying here at CBTS, for anything that we do, whether that’s application, modernization, AI transformation, it needs to be security by design. So security by design has to be a full principle. It’s something we really believe in,” Rice said.

It’s no secret companies are racing to add AI capabilities. However, Rice said they are often not thinking about the potential vulnerabilities.

“I’m encouraging companies as we go through these conversations around transformation: You cannot forget about security because it’ll be a major risk,” Rice said.