Okta (NASDAQ:OKTA) executives said the company is positioning its identity platform to play a central role in securing and governing artificial intelligence agents, arguing that the emerging “agentic” technology market could ultimately exceed the size of today’s identity and access management market.
Speaking at the company’s Investor Summit at Oktane 2026, Co-Founder and CEO Todd McKinnon said AI agents are driving changes across the technology stack and will require new approaches to identity, governance, visibility and security. He described the shift as a long-term opportunity, while acknowledging that adoption will take time and competition will intensify.
Blueprint Alliance and an Open Ecosystem
McKinnon discussed the company’s Blueprint Alliance, an industry effort intended to bring more clarity to the security architecture needed for AI agents. He said the initiative is designed to help customers distinguish between functions such as AI gateways, MCP gateways, risk management and governance, rather than forcing customers to make decisions amid a fragmented vendor landscape.
According to McKinnon, the alliance’s goal is to “make the pie bigger for everyone” by encouraging interoperability and providing customers with a framework for deploying secure agentic systems. He said the next phase will depend on customer adoption and endorsement, followed by work with alliance partners to validate that products operate together within a reference architecture.
While analysts raised the prospect of joint go-to-market arrangements and economic incentives among alliance members, McKinnon said those efforts would be premature before customer traction and technical integration are established.
He also highlighted Cross App Access, described as an open protocol for enabling agents to securely access applications. Okta is making its Agent SSO capability broadly available across its products to encourage independent software vendors to support the protocol. McKinnon said the company expects broader adoption of the protocol to create a path toward paid upgrades to Okta for AI Agents, which provides additional lifecycle management, governance and connection capabilities.
Third-Party Identity Provider Support
Okta executives said support for third-party identity providers is an important part of their strategy, particularly for customers using Microsoft Entra ID. McKinnon said many large organizations have Microsoft identity deployments but are seeking a more flexible platform for AI-agent use cases and connections with non-Microsoft technologies.
Ric Smith, Okta’s President of Products and Technology, said the company is seeing growing demand to connect its offerings to independent identity providers. Okta plans to expand that approach across governance, privileged access management and the Auth0 platform, he said.
McKinnon said AI-related discussions can lead to broader platform deployments, including workforce identity, governance, privilege management and customer identity capabilities. Jon Addison, Okta’s Chief Revenue Officer, said the company’s specialized sales organization has helped AI conversations reach a broad set of stakeholders, including CIOs, CISOs and teams responsible for external-facing applications.
Buying Centers, Monetization and Sales Motion
Addison said spending on agentic security is still typically sourced from traditional CIO and CISO budgets, though the company is increasingly seeing R&D and engineering budgets support external-facing agent initiatives. McKinnon said approximately 80% of his current AI-agent discussions remain with IT and security buyers, but he expects more involvement from business-oriented leaders, such as chief digital officers, as customer-facing agent use cases develop.
For Okta for AI Agents, McKinnon said pricing currently is generally tied to users because many early deployments are intended to improve the productivity of individual employees. He said pricing is likely to evolve toward an agent-based model as workflows become more autonomous, though the industry has not yet developed a standard way to count agents.
Using round numbers, McKinnon said certain sizable deals have included AI-agent spending of roughly 1 to 1.5 against an overall Okta platform spend of 4. He said that implies an uplift comparable to, or potentially greater than, the company has seen with Okta Identity Governance attachments, while cautioning that the sample size remains small.
Addison said Okta has revised its sales methodology for AI and invested in tools, specialized teams and partner relationships to address customers’ varied maturity levels and use cases. He said partners co-sold the company’s top 20 deals in the second quarter, and Okta’s largest deal in that period was partner sourced.
Early Adoption and Public Sector Opportunity
McKinnon said organizations adopting Okta for AI Agents are generally already pursuing agentic capabilities through third-party platforms or internal development efforts. He cited companies including Ramp, Yahoo and Dell as examples of businesses that see potential in agents and are moving forward with deployments.
He characterized current adopters as early adopters and said wider adoption may take longer than expected, but could ultimately be larger than anticipated. Comparing the opportunity with the demand catalyst created by the COVID-19 pandemic, McKinnon said the agentic transition “feels way bigger” because it represents a new technology shift rather than the culmination of an existing move toward identity-centric security.
In public sector markets, Addison said agentic deployments remain early, though the company has seen strong broader public-sector performance following investments in regulated environments, including FedRAMP High and IL5. McKinnon added that large government agencies are pursuing pilots and prototypes for Okta for AI Agents, with compliance readiness across the platform remaining a key requirement for deployment.
About Okta (NASDAQ:OKTA)
Okta, Inc provides cloud-based identity and access management solutions for organizations. Its platform helps businesses securely connect employees, customers, partners and applications while managing authentication, authorization and user access across cloud, on-premises and mobile environments.
The company’s offerings include single sign-on, multifactor authentication, adaptive access controls, lifecycle management, identity governance and privileged access capabilities. Through its Customer Identity Cloud, powered by Auth0, Okta also provides tools for developers and businesses to embed authentication and authorization features into applications and digital services.
Founded in 2009 by Todd McKinnon and Frederic Kerrest, Okta completed its initial public offering in 2017.
