Keep pulling the thread on Todd McKinnon.
Okta has announced a "Blueprint for the Agentic Enterprise" with three main pillars: onboarding agents as a new identity type, standardizing connection points, and providing a "kill switch" for rogue agents.
Okta's CEO, Todd McKinnon, stated on an earnings call that the company is "paranoid" about the threat of customers using agentic software and LLMs to build their own identity tools instead of buying Okta's products.
Okta has approximately $3 billion in revenue, over 10% year-over-year growth, and 20,000 customers.
Okta's CEO believes a large new market is emerging for managing the identity of AI agents, including tracking them, defining their roles, and controlling their permissions.
Okta's CEO, Todd McKinnon, predicts the emerging market for AI agent identity could become the largest category in cybersecurity, and winning this market is Okta's top priority.
Todd McKinnon views the emergence of OpenClaw as the "ChatGPT moment for agents," significantly raising awareness of what is possible with agentic AI.
Companies like Palantir, Snowflake, and Databricks are succeeding by allowing enterprises to consolidate data into a single data warehouse for AI agents to access, as an alternative to connecting agents to numerous separate systems.
The total market for software, including infrastructure, SaaS, and hyperscalers, is approximately $1.2 trillion, while the IT services market is about $1.8 trillion.
Todd McKinnon predicts that the most successful "digital worker" companies will likely be new entrants rather than legacy app vendors like Microsoft and Salesforce, because legacy companies are too focused on their existing functional silos.
Todd McKinnon predicts there will be more software engineers in five years than there are now, despite the rise of AI code generation.
Okta's "kill switch" for AI agents works by revoking an agent's connections and access to all systems and data, effectively taking it off the network.
Okta has a market capitalization of approximately $14 billion.