This presentation contains forward-looking statements. We reserve the right to change the information in this presentation. More information can be found in our security filings.
Please welcome Okta's chief executive officer and co-founder, Todd McKinnon. Congratulations. You are part of the biggest Oktane ever.
Thank you for being here. It was one year ago that we introduced this simple but powerful concept, and that was to secure AI, we needed a powerful new identity type — an identity type where every AI agent got their own identity. And I've been on a plane this last year almost every week talking to all of you about your challenges and what you're looking to get out of this technology. And the feedback has been amazing. So, thank you for meeting with me. Thank you for informing us on this journey and helping us build the right thing for the industry at this time.
I ran across this quote recently and I thought it was an accurate reflection of our industry right now. Talent hits a target no one else can hit, but genius hits a target no one else can see. And AI agents, they promise to do both.
I think as an industry, we're focused on the talent side of this right now. We're looking at our existing processes, making them more effective, making them more efficient, getting cost optimization. But the real prize, the real potential is genius. How do we get to that product breakthrough that no one even knew was possible? How do we invent new things? How do we discover new cures for diseases? This is the potential of AI. So, how are we going to make that happen? How do we get there? I think watching this technology the last couple of years, we have an intuitive feel for this. It's about more connections. The models get better when you give them more data. Systems get better when you connect them to more other systems to allow them to take actions. That is how we get to genius. That is how we get to genius.
And we also know, living in the world right now, that this comes with risk. So every process you optimize, you hear a headline about a cyber attack, someone taking advantage of this technology and breaking in. And we all understand that, you know, when we're looking for the cure for disease, we could unleash something like a bioweapon. And that's risk. So as an industry right now, we're being forced to choose. We either lock it all down and don't connect AI to anything and get the security. That's no good. We don't want to lock it down. Or we let it connect to everything, free it up, and go for the innovation. It's not a great choice. So, how do we get the best of both worlds here? And the solution is simple. Not easy, but simple. And that is visibility and control.
Bringing visibility and control is how we break this deadlock and get security and innovation. And at Okta, our vision as a company is to free everyone to safely use any technology. So I feel like the luckiest guy in the world leading this company at this time. We're at exactly the perfect moment. We have to bring visibility and control to this industry right now. That is how we're going to enable all of you to safely use any technology. We're the perfect company at the perfect time. And it's incredibly motivating to all of us to go make this happen and change the industry. We've been at this for a while, 17 years. And if you were unclear how long that is, here's a picture of me right about the time I started Okta and our daughter getting ready to go play some basketball on a Saturday. This little girl, she's going to be like this forever. And this past weekend, in case you were wondering how long 17 years is, we dropped her off at university.
Yeah, it was very exciting for her. It's definitely a little bit melancholy. But her first day on campus, she called me to complain about having too many systems to log into. And I said, "Julia, evidently 20,000 customers isn't enough. We need 20,001. We'll get to work on that." Every month, 58 billion authentications, 58 billion connections between people and machines and the technology and the resources you need to be effective and productive. So we're in the perfect position to help match security and innovation by solving the challenges of our industry. So a key part of doing that is standardization. Technology is too complex. It's too well together. And to bring innovation and security together, we're going to need standardization on a massive scale. So today we're going to talk about that in three sections. The first section is the blueprint for the secure agentic enterprise. Second, agent SSO, a powerful new standard that enables agents to connect seamlessly to resources. And finally,
biggest competition — they expect me to mention another vendor or platform, but the answer is something different actually. Our biggest competition is confusion. When I talk to all of you, you're confused. Every vendor is coming at you saying that their solution is the one solution that will help you secure everything, will help you create all the AI you need, and lead your organization to glory. Now, you all know intuitively that reality is quite different. What's happening in our industry right now is every layer of the technology stack is being transformed by AI. It's not just one new group of vendors or tools or companies. It's every layer of the stack, from infrastructure to applications to data to agents you're building yourself, agents startups are selling you. So no one company can secure agents alone. It's not realistic. We're talking about a complete transformation of the technology stack.
So we took this feedback and we're going to do something about it. We went out and we've built, we've locked arm-in-arm with some of the leading companies in our industry to create a blueprint alliance. And all these companies, industry leaders — AWS, CrowdStrike, Salesforce, many others — they're motivated by the same thing we are. Confusion is their competition as well, and we need to work together to clarify that. And the blueprint alliance, working together, is centered on four key questions. The first question is: where are my agents? Second question is: what can they do? Thirdly, what are they actually doing? And fourth is: how do I respond? So if we answer these four questions, it'll clarify that confusion and put us all on this journey toward building the secure agentic enterprise.
So the teams have been together, the top product and engineering people from these companies have been together hammering this out in quite a sophisticated level of detail. And just like a blueprint for a building, it has the electrical sub plan, it has the structural plan, it has the plumbing plan. Our blueprint is broken down into four sections. The first section answers the question: where are my agents? This is about visibility and control. This is about an agentic registry so you can keep agents from multiple systems coordinated and give them all a unique identity. The second question is about what can they do? What connections can they make? What do they have the permissions to do? Making sure those permissions match the appropriate entitlements that those agents need. This is also about governance of the life cycle of the agent to make sure that an agent today and tomorrow and a month and a year from now still needs the access that it's granted.
The third pillar is the runtime pillar. It's actually what are the agents actually doing? What is the intent of the call or the application for that agent, and how does it match up with the actual performance and the actual execution? This is things like network monitoring and other types of monitoring and observability so that we can see that the agents are doing actually what we think they should be doing. And finally, all of this is incredibly valuable because it sets you up and defines how you respond. The kill switch everyone talks about is in this pillar. If something goes wrong, if it gets off track, if it's malicious or it's just an error, how do we actually disconnect it and make sure it stays in line with what we want to do?
So, this is all built on a common framework of risk signals. The alliance has defined what the risk signals are and what the protocol format for sharing the risk signals is. So different parts of the blueprint and different components of the blueprint can share risk signals with a common understanding of what they mean. And of course it's consistently defined how telemetry and observability and monitoring — because the whole point of this is bringing visibility and control. So central telemetry and logging is absolutely important.
So, there's a ton of detail here and the keynote would be way too long to go into all of it. So, you get out your phone and scan this QR code. It'll take you to a couple important resources. It'll take you to the white paper that lays this all out, and you can also order the room service menu from here.
So, we're super lucky today to be joined by a leader from one of the founding members of the Blueprint Alliance. So, please let's give a warm welcome to Chad Kapor, vice president from Amazon.
It's great to see you, Chad. Sorry about your travel problems today.
Right. We were supposed to be on stage together and here we are.
So why is securing AI agents, in your view, a cross-industry challenge?
So, it's really interesting, you know. I've always been very comfortable with speed, and my mother would say probably too comfortable with speed. And recently I've gotten into a little bit of a fan of F1 racing, and I keep thinking about things and how you think about a race car and things like that. And I actually think that AI is like a race car, right? And we keep thinking about brakes as a way of actually slowing down. But if you really think about brakes, it actually gives you the confidence to take the corner at full speed. And so if you start going down that path, you realize that AI is different from everything we've ever done in software because it's not deterministic. It's probabilistic.
And the very thing that gives agents power also makes it really hard to secure because they don't follow the same path every time. And so the way I think about agents is they're a lot like human actors, right? With one big difference, right? That you have access to their brains. But it's very clear the more access you give them, the more responsibility you give them, the more powerful they get. And so I love the four questions you bring up, and I'm sure we'll talk about it more — like where are your agents? What can they do? What are they actually doing? And when something goes wrong, how do you respond? Because if you answer these questions for every agent, you realize that there are going to be agents all over the place, right? I mean, AWS will do them, there'll be SaaS vendors that do them, customers will build their own agents, and they all have to work together. And that's exactly why we need this blueprint that we're working with you and many others in the alliance for.
How do you see it solving this challenge of moving customers beyond prototyping and experimenting and into production? I imagine you guys run into that a lot with your scale and your capabilities.
So it's interesting. I think the biggest thing is I talk to about five or ten CISOs a week, and the conversation always starts from "I want to move faster, but I need to manage risks." And the interesting thing about this, where we are, it's not just a CISO discussion — you know, with things like this, it's actually become a board and a CEO-level discussion, right? And so I think what customers are really...
Yeah, they can't avoid it. The news is hammering it every day.
Yeah, and my take is, and I think a lot of CISOs are moving, right? They're starting to think about this and saying, "I cannot be the one that says no, right? I've got to be the one that actually gives the guardrails and figures out a way to make it happen." So they want some way to move, but they want confidence that they can actually do it. So to answer the questions you brought up at a very high level for folks, as you think about it, they want to see, they want to govern, they want to contain everything in their environment, right? So make sure that every agent has an identity, a verified identity, and a named owner, right? Make sure they have task-scoped access, right? What can they do, right? What are they doing? They have real-time monitoring and tracing, and then containment, right? You not only stop an agent, you let it back in without affecting the rest of the system. So I think the biggest thing that we have to land on doing as an industry is we cannot solve this problem by having more gates and manual reviews. Otherwise you're dragging AI, this race car, back to the human speed. And I think that's going to be a problem.
Yeah. That'd be like a safe Formula 1 race where they only went 25 miles an hour. Yeah.
Not too exciting, Chad. Not too exciting.
Yeah. No, not too exciting at all.
As the blueprint — how are you feeling about the Blueprint Alliance helping the blueprint evolve as the industry evolves? I know that's an important part. This isn't a static thing that's going to just be here in September of 2026. It's a living, breathing thing, and how are we going to make that happen?
So here's what I think. Ultimately, we are heading towards doing things at machine speeds, right? And the world we're coming from is, you know, telemetry, storage, query, and then dashboards for humans, right? And the world we're heading to is you have all this telemetry, you have context, you have reasoning, and then actions by agents. And so if you look at those two, that's the bookends — where we are and where we're heading. I think it's really important that we understand that it's about starting in learn mode, right? We call it the learn mode, which is you start with humans in the loop, right? They can approve things, and over a period of time you get humans on the loop where they only are looking at exceptions. And then as time goes on, you get more confidence, and you know there's a — you can go to autonomy. And the thing that I really like about the blueprint is that we actually give folks a trusted ramp to go off and make it happen. And additionally, what I also like about this, Todd, and I know this is Oktane and I'm talking to you — this is a lot bigger than just vendor, right? It avoids vendor lock-in, and this is a lot bigger than Okta. This is a lot bigger than AWS. It's about making sure the industry can adopt and actually go off and make agents work in their environment safely with the right guardrails.
Yeah. Well said, Chad. So, thank you so much for joining us. Next year, we'll get you out here in person. We'll make sure we have...
Next time I'll come in the night before.
Yeah. I can't wait. And thank you so much for being part of the alliance and helping us build the secure agentic future together.
It was great. Good luck with the rest of the keynote. Thank you.
Thank you, Chad. Everyone.
That last thing we talked about is very important. This is not an Okta product. We are locking arms with everyone in the industry to move the secure agentic enterprise forward, and it's going to take us all. And Okta as a company, our independence and our neutrality positions us perfectly to do that. We don't have a horse in the race. We're not trying to sell you a broad suite of security tools. We're not trying to sell you a bunch of applications. We're focused on identity and building the secure agentic enterprise and giving you the choice and flexibility and neutrality to make it all work for you.
A key part of this blueprint and some very exciting developments on the standardization we're seeking is in the "what can they do" pillar, and it's all around agent SSO. Now, nothing gets me more exciting than SSO. I'm thrilled by this. It's how we built our company, and we need this for agents because the current state of things is not ideal. So here to show you this, please welcome Mallerie Sward Glenn. Mallerie.
Mallerie works in product marketing at Okta. So, it's not uncommon for me to send her a message frantically seeking a new roadmap completely updated with up-to-date delivery dates and status of all the deliverables. Mallerie, what do you do?
It's true. We're going to use Claude for that. I'm going to try to automate a lot of the boring stuff here. So, to do this, Claude's going to need access to a few things to actually do this. It'll need Atlassian for our product docs. It's going to need access to GitHub to go grab those product issues, and then ultimately to Slack to send you that roadmap. So, right off the bat, we'll get into Claude here. And what you're going to see, we're actually not connected to any of these resources. So, we're going to need to go through...
Right? We're trying here.
Let's get going. So, Atlassian, we will go ahead and authenticate into Atlassian. So, I'll click here. I'm going to need to type in an email, type in my password here as well once we get to it. And these consent prompts, I can accept these, right, Todd? That seems okay. So, from here, we'll do the next one. We got to do the same thing for GitHub. So, GitHub, we're going to run the same flow here. So, I'm going to type in my email again. We'll need to type in the password. And again, this agent's just acting on behalf of me. So I can just approve these here. We got one more, Todd, because we got to send it to you. So we're going to do the same thing for Slack. Going to authenticate into Slack here. I'm going to type in my email.
Wait a minute. Wait a minute. These models are going to take over the world and they can't connect to Slack.
That's what they say. That's what they say. And we will password. Probably should have done this myself at this point. I'll accept. Would have been faster. Okay. So, as you saw, Todd, and as many of you probably saw, this was incredibly frustrating for me as an end user, but it was also incredibly insecure. By the end of that, you saw it was just kind of blindly accepting consent prompts for this agent.
So, clearly, clearly this is not ideal. Clearly, you might call this a mess. So, there's got to be a better way. And that's why we've developed agent SSO. It brings the same great user experience for SSO for a person to the world of AI agents. And the great thing about it is we've made it available in every Okta product. So you all have agent SSO. You get agent SSO, and you get agent SSO, and you get agent SSO. No additional charge. It's out there in the world for you to use and take advantage of. So Mallerie, once they use this, what's the experience going to be like?
Let's run that workflow again. This time using agent SSO. You're going to notice something different right off the bat. I'm going to log into Claude. I'm going to use FastPass for this. Already no passwords already. Way quicker. Before I ask Claude to pull this roadmap for you, let's see if we're actually connected to resources. And if you look here, what you can see is we are. We're connected to Atlassian. We're connected to GitHub. We've got Slack. We also have a few other connections here that have been set up for us. We've got ServiceNow and Google because I need those to do other parts of my job. Notice I didn't have to do anything here. These were all ready for me right off the bat.
