Todd McKinnon identifies a massive new market opportunity in managing the identity of non-human AI agents. This involves onboarding them, defining their permissions, tracking their actions, and providing a "kill switch" to revoke access, creating a parallel identity infrastructure for a new class of digital workers.
The rise of AI poses a potential threat to traditional SaaS models, as customers might build their own tools. McKinnon expresses a "healthy paranoia" about this trend but argues that for mission-critical infrastructure like identity, the complexity of integration, reliability, and security creates a strong moat that is difficult to replicate.
The CEO frames the current technological shift driven by AI and agents as a disruption larger and more fundamental than the transition to cloud computing. This belief underpins the company's sense of urgency and its aggressive pivot towards new markets and a faster rate of internal change.
Despite AI's growing ability to write code, McKinnon predicts there will be more software engineers in five years, not fewer. He argues their roles will evolve to focus on higher-level tasks like system architecture, scalability, and maintaining complex, agent-built systems as the overall demand for software explodes.
Keep pulling the thread on Todd McKinnon.