Okta CEO Sees Big Opportunity in AI

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00:00What did you feel you delivered in terms of software and it not getting eaten up by big

00:04AI offerings? Well, the business is doing great. We had a solid third quarter. I think

00:09what the market is digesting is this massive opportunity ahead of us to secure AI. And what

00:15everyone's realizing is that to secure AI, you have to secure identity. All these companies are

00:21trying to roll out AI agents. And to make these agents useful, they have to be connected to all

00:25of a company's data. If it's not connected to a company's data and the agent can't work on that

00:30data, it's no better than a consumer chat GPT or Gemini. And we can help companies connect their

00:36agents to data in a secure and manageable way so they can get a great agentic experience for their

00:41customers and employees and keep it all secure. Reflect then on actually the adoption of this

00:47agentic AI. Because we've got questions in the market abound about whether Microsoft's having to

00:51really be able to scale in the way that it thought it could in the adoption of agentic AI.

00:56What are you seeing? Are people jumping on it? Well, the inbound interest we have for these new

01:02products, Okta for AI agents, is something like I've never seen in my history at Okta. And so everyone

01:08is very interested, but they're all stuck. They're stuck because they're realizing they have to connect it

01:13to their company's data. And that's challenging. They have two choices. They can put it all in a data

01:18warehouse right in the middle and give the agents access to everything, which is problematic because

01:23they don't know what the agents are going to do with it. Or they can just have a very vanilla

01:27watered-down experience where it looks just like the consumer chat GPT you would use at home.

01:32So we offer a better choice. We can connect it to that data in a secure way that lets them govern

01:37and manage it. And that's why the interest is so high. So this is, I think, a big unlock. And that's

01:41what I think everyone is starting to realize. There are a few identity management offerings out there.

01:45How do you compete against the Palo Alto networks, against Microsoft itself that wants to offer it

01:49and offering you the authentic AI as well? Yeah, the way I like to explain it is these companies

01:54have to choose the right platforms and systems to build out this AI future. And imagine, like an

02:01analogy I use is, imagine if you had to choose one streaming service. You had to pick one. You had

02:07to pick either Prime Video or Netflix, and then that's the only one you could watch. That's what some of

02:11these big platforms are saying. They're saying, use everything from us. It's like, just, you can

02:16only use Netflix, and you better hope all your shows are on Netflix. What we're saying is, you can

02:20choose whatever AI technology you want. You can get some, you can get a model from Google. You can get

02:25infrastructure from Amazon. You can get application data from Salesforce, and we'll make it all work

02:29together. You can choose any show you want to watch, so to speak. So we don't lock people in. We give

02:35them a choice across all of the different platforms. And that's very important in this, in this

02:39innovation, because these things are changing every week. Google comes out with a brand new model.

02:42Open AI is going to have a new model, and customers want choice, and we give that to them.

02:46Todd, it's interesting that you're saying you're seeing interest like you've never seen before

02:50and since your time at Okta. Why then is the market still thinking that actually your revenue

02:55growth is kind of going to flatline, be sub-10% growth? Do you see something different?

03:01Well, I think we see two things. We see a very solid business that is profitable and growing

03:06at a nice clip. And then we see this massive upside. So I think the market is trying to

03:10understand how quick it materializes, you know, how big it can be. And we're very excited. We

03:15think it could be bigger than our core business. The opportunity to secure AI could be bigger

03:19than anything we've ever done, but it's just a matter of making that real and doing the

03:23hard work with the customers to bring it to fruition.

03:26When we're hearing about how companies are actually adopting more broadly, what are you seeing

03:31most? Are you seeing consultants coming in? Are you seeing companies trying to build

03:35within and of themselves organically? Are you seeing the likes of the sellers of these

03:39generative AI offerings, the open AIs or indeed the Microsofts going in and almost consulting

03:43for them? How are we better to streamline? As you say, we're stuck. How do we unstick?

03:50I think it, I mean, I think it's all of the above. We're seeing a starting, a lot of interest

03:56in the agentic solutions that the SaaS providers have rolled out. Again, those are powerful, but

04:01they're limited in the sense they're constrained to one application or one service. We're

04:05seeing a lot of companies start to build their own where they're using developer tools and

04:10capabilities to connect multiple databases and warehouses across different SaaS applications.

04:16We're seeing organic internal development. We're seeing consultants. Everyone's trying

04:21to help them do this. And I think some of these key unlocks like security and identity and context

04:26and the right access permissions are going to help move this thing along in a way that's very,

04:30very powerful, powerful for everyone because this technology is real and it's quite profound

04:35and it can make employees more productive. It can help companies grow into new industries

04:39and new markets. It's going to be a big boon for established companies, for new companies.

04:43It's very exciting.

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