YouSaid · the spoken record

Todd McKinnon

lines on the record: 66
first: 2026-03-30
most recent: 2026-03-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think they should be thinking about how they build the secure Agentic Enterprise and how they can use the blueprint we're proposing to the entire industry and how to make that possible. And we're excited to work with everyone in the industry and particularly the tools and technologies and products we're going to be building to make sure that reality comes to fruition.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do, yeah. There's technical solutions, there's also process and regulatory parts of it. I think ultimately the most privacy-preserving thing is like no technology. So there's going to be a trade-off if you are trying to automate something and you're trying to bring technology to something, you're going to, there's going to be a risk of centralization and privacy controls. But I do think it's possible to get the bones right.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We work with the vendors that are trying to log people in and they want the best tools and technologies to do age verification. So we're going to make sure we equip them with that. It's a lot of times not a technical issue. It's like what ID system do you trust? And is there an ID system for someone that's 12, 13, 14 years old? And so I think one of the challenges has been out of the scope of a lot of the driver's license-based or passport national ID-based discussions. But I think that'll be a use case that'll be covered, I think, by governments fairly quickly.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, governments are deciding and governments are deciding on that they want to digitize, they want to issue these passports and these national IDs and in Europe it's certain standards across the EU. In the United States, it's very much at a state level. And our customers are really excited about it and we're giving them all the capabilities to take advantage of this stuff without really specific judgment about how they should do it. We're just trying to arm them to make sure that they can accept all the regulatory requirements and also all the identities and the digital formats that their users and their citizens want. So it's a big part of our future and we're working hard on that.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was possible before. So it's a big deal. Like, people need to really know in certain use cases when it's an agent, when it's a bot. This bot problem is not new. It's like the old problem on Twitter and X and Elon Musk is on trial for talking about bots and how many bots there were. And now I think with AI, it's becoming supercharged. And I think with what we have with these national IDs and passports and mobile driver's license being digitized, we might have a shot to actually bring some sanity to that world.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“40% of our business is authenticating and validating customers, logging into customer websites and mobile apps. And this area is changing a lot with AI as well. And I think what you're seeing is that the offline identity driver's license passports, these are rapidly digitizing. And I think it's coming at a great time too because it gives us something to offer people that really want to do a better job differentiating between agents in OpenClaw and bots logging into their sites and real people. And so as the offline identities digitize, people have mobile driver's license. The smartphone wallets are getting pretty capable now and you can do fancy things just like you do Apple Pay. You can do a biometric authentication into your mobile driver's license and then that becomes a very powerful thing to present to a website that will actually prove you're a person or in a better sense.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“AI maybe broadly is we will remove these intermediaries, right? The thing I keep saying is that your computer will just go access the databases all its own. You don't need these app intermediaries or whatever. And we're going to reshape the app economy. Then I look at, okay, there's a bunch of scammers online who are just setting up fake hotel service numbers and calling grandparents and like sealing bookings with like AI receptionists by just doing SEO hustles and collecting pennies. And like Okta has a role to play there too, right? By saying, okay, this is fraud, this is scam. You shouldn't hand over your identity here. I'm not sure anyone is paying attention to that, but I see it ballooning every day, like just AI-powered scams and frauds and identity theft. The idea that, you know, someone's going to call me and verify me by voice is under threat by AI in very specific ways. How do you see the flip side here of making sure that the core business octaves in?”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing about that, and I think a lot of these friends and ideas remember is like that, you know, no one cares about the infrastructure. No one cares about the, well, this is obviously a dramatic statement. I'll explain what I mean, but people care about the app in the sense that they care about what it can do. And the reason why OpenClaw was such a lightning in a bottle is because they saw what was possible. They saw what it could do. Now the fact that it had to do that by connecting to all these systems and it required access and there were security issues. It's like, that's infrastructure and people that once their mindset gets set on the possible, then it's up to industry to figure out how it all works under this covers, but people care about the possible and the apps. And I think that you're going to see it ripple through. I think it's, like I said, I thought it was the chat GPT of agents and it's very exciting.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Isn't that, and again, just to bring this back to OpenCloud, which I think probably most of the audience is most familiar with, that is the promise of that system, right? That's why it lit everyone's brains up, because it was running just from system to system and then doing some logic and coming up with some outcomes.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not yet. What is happening now is that people are just getting familiar with the, call it the siloed agents. They're just getting familiar with the agents in Microsoft or the agents in Salesforce. We're not really to the phage yet of really multi-silo agents, agents that can go from stovepipe to stovepipe and do these. In the cases there are, but that era is still ahead of us. And I think as you get more to that era, some of these issues have become more significant.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, there is no software, there is no applications, there's this IBM box, and you get it, and we are technology. And customers want a choice and find the government stepped in and said, you got to split it up. You got to have operating systems, you got to have hardware, you got to have software. And so I think similar thing. It's like, yeah, of course, every big vendor that's trying to protect their entrenched things, whether it's Microsoft with their new bundle where they're trying to lock everyone in, they're going to say, you know, it all has to be on our thing and you can't use your You can't use other agents against our agents because our agents are better because they have our data and our workflow and ultimately it's going to be customers that demand change and if there's so much monopolistic lock-in that we have to rely on regulators to come in and fix it.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's only one thing it's customers. I mean, customers have to have the, the customers will have the leverage eventually. And if the customers in like a market mechanism don't have the leverage, the government will step in and do antitrust. I mean, the reason we have a software industry.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was because there was no security built into it. And instead of acting on behalf of a person, it just represented itself as a person and it was off to the races. You know, Salesforce can't keep an actual human user from using a different system or orchestrating in their own head, right? Well, when you build the agents inside the corporate network, you can absolutely do those things. And Salesforce can absolutely write a terms of service that says we don't want the agent from your rival vendor using our system as well. Are those just politics? Is that negotiation? How's that going to work?”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do you think about Octa sits in the middle? You were talking about, I don't know, there's Salesforce that has its own agents, there's other vendors. They are not going to want those agents to work across their databases, right? This comes back to like, I think the central challenge here. And the reason why something like OpenClaw was able to be so powerful so quickly because it had nothing to do with any of those companies or those platforms. It was just clicking around in a browser.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty pragmatic about it, meaning that we know that the behavior of these systems is non-deterministic, and you have to, it's all about like getting this balance right between give it flexibility to what data and systems and things it can access and do and what operations. But then having the ability to rein it in when it goes too far. I think that's the right ultimately that's the right way to balance effectiveness of these systems and the risk. There's no free lunch. Like you have to give it the data if you want it to be effective. And you kind of have to decide if you have zero tolerance for non-deterministic behavior, you can't give the data. You can't give it the permission. And so that's kind of the balance that we're helping customers strike.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you look at how the agents operate, you can go look at the chain of thinking at any one of these systems. A lot of times they're just talking to themselves in weird ways. I feel like you're provisioning identity, obviously Okta doesn't think about identity in the most deeply philosophical ways. Anthropic is like very happy to hint that Claude is alive, right? When you think about, okay, I'm a provider of identity to these systems that are a hybrid between people and something else. Does it ever occur to you that like they might be reasoning in a way that is more human or not, or that you need to address that in some way in the architecture of how you permission them?”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about having a system that controls what something has access to, a lot of it's very similar to a person, meaning that just like you would give a person access to applications and then inside of those services and applications, you would say, here's their role, here's their group, here's their profile. That's a lot of the way these agents are being built and modeled. The reason it's not like a person is because you have relationship between the people and the agents in a way that they're on behalf of and you want to always take the identity of the person and pass it to the agent and have it used that sometimes you want the agent to have its own identity and the systems that tech talks to do their permissions based on what the agent is and then it goes back to the person as a human in the loop. So there's different patterns so that if you actually look at the physical directory of agents, some of the elements are very much like a person and some of them are only because they're these agents that can be on behalf of people.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We don't have a magic solution to that because it kind of depends on the point of the agent, and that's kind of dependent on the person that wrote the agent and the system it came from. But we're working on standards for people to raise that issue, or not from a technical sense, like raise an alert and have the other elements of the system respond to that.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happens, it gives you the ability essentially pull the plug like take the connections away in terms of like, oh, this agent is doing something we didn't expect. Now what we can do is we can pull away its connections.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of them are totally headless and they're just on their own thing, automating some things, and they need a human in the loop. And you can kind of start to organize things that way. But it's all kind of framed in this concept of mapping across different silos. So you have agents, you built yourself, you have platforms you're using like Amazon or Microsoft or Google, you have big apps you're using like Salesforce and ServiceNow. And it lets you centralize all that in a way that doesn't lock you into one of those silos. And then, like you said, it can help you say, all right, all these things unequivocally need to connect to more things. And I can control where they connect to, when they connect to that data warehouse, what permissions do they have in that data warehouse? And then across all the different various technologies. And then like you said, stuff is going to go wrong. And there's going to be issues and threats and prompt injection.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Agents are a new identity type, and it's kind of like a combination of, it has some attributes of a human identity and some attributes of just a system. And it's basically a hybrid of both. And so from a definition perspective, it's pretty simple. I think where it gets interesting is it becomes a map that centralizes the list of agents from all your vendors. So it can represent agents from all the big platforms. It gives you this central way to kind of keep track of it all. And that's what companies are struggling with. They are all the announcements and they're very excited about this. They just need a place. Hey, let me bring it in centrally and let me see what I have. And now once I see what I have, I can, you know, some of these things are very much just one-to-one with people. Some of them, there's a set of agents that multiple agents that work with one person.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sox is an outside a blueprint for Agentic Enterprise. It's basically got three big pillars, right? It's how to onboard agents as an identity, which is I'm very curious about what you think about the difference between agent identity and actual person. To standardize connection points, which you've talked about a little bit. And then lastly, and this one is great, is to private a kill switch in case your agents go rogue. So talking about the first one, you want to create a new identity for agents in the workforce on your network. What does that look like? How is it defined differently than an employee or a person?”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There'll be a wave of people building agentic systems and agentic systems to do the jobs people do now or help people do the jobs people do now, then there'll be another wave of things that are automating processes that weren't possible before. We're still in the early parts of that second phase where we're thinking about, hey, we could build this new set of digital workers and we're going to get productivity. We really haven't gotten to this point where what is the process that should be happening in all these workflows if it could just be agendic from the start.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Agents connect to a bunch of other systems, they need to get their data. So there's some standardization that's required here too. But I mean zooming out, it's like, isn't it exciting? It's such a challenge. It'd be much easier if things were just stayed the same and we could kind of keep like in our own little lanes and.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different way to frame what you're saying is that the you know it's there's an unbundling and there's like a data layer and an intelligence layer and a front end layer but what also is happening is that it's all kind of getting more connected we think of an app and a database and a user interface as one thing but as that unbundling happens what really is happening is all the apps that you thought were in various silos are connecting to each other and that's because there's agents on top of them that are connecting to all those silos there's the apps themselves are becoming more agentic and you know and we're as a as octa as a company this is this is why i'm so excited about this agentic identity and these guardrails we've talked about it's also why we're this this needs to be standardized in the industry there's no good standard for how we have pretty good standards now for how you know when you single sign on into your applications how that interaction works between you and your browser and your phone and the applications there's no good standards for how”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You don't want to have the ones and zeros in gigabytes of data coming at you. So you're really talking about intelligence. And that's the big debate about SAS apocalypse. Who's going to view that intelligence? Is it the app vendors we have now? I mean, even, you know, I mentioned the data warehouse companies like Databricks and Snowflakes and Palantir, they're not really, I mean, they're selling essentially they're selling some kind of intelligence. The valuable part of their business is not the ones and zeros. So the question is like, who's going to do the intelligence? And I think that the application companies are going to add some to their capabilities and there's going to be new ones. And there's going to be new ones that intelligence actually becomes work, not in the sense of app work, but sense of where people would have done.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's data, and then there's intelligence. And I think a lot of the intelligence is now in the past has been codified in the application. Raw database is not that helpful. I mean, when you say you want to talk to the database, what you're really saying is you want some kind of analysis or intelligence done by something.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I think about The value of agents going out in the world, as you've described, they need access to a lot of data. The notion that my company has a bunch of disparate databases and that I should hire an agent to go look at all those databases and put them together and use the software, the thing that gets me at that every time is the notion that they're going to build software because I'm not sure the agents are building software for anything but agents to use and at some point that software just gets very specialized and very narrow and it is access to the databases that becomes the most valuable thing. One of our own designers here at the Verge said to me right before I came to talk to you, he heard I was talking to you and he said, all software development in 2026 is just calibrating the interface between your brain and a database. And like right now, all AI development is like, would you like to just chat with this database? And the answer in the enterprise appears to be yes. Like, let me just talk to my analytics database directly like a person.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A large complex system at scale, learning that in college and learning that on the job and people that are early in their career leveling up. And there's also this narrative out there that, oh, we don't need any entry-level developers anymore. That's a bad mindset to have because, first of all, those are the people that are probably most open to doing things differently. They're the least set in their ways. So I think entry-level folks will learn how to use these tools and command these workflows to do things at scale in a way that people that learn 10, 15 years ago didn't.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Maybe not what everyone says because people like to extrapolate and say everything in the world is changing, the education system is going to change. Everything's going to change. I think a lot of the things where people learn, they'll learn, like in college, I think we'll still teach computer science. It'll just be different. Just like 50 years ago, we didn't teach modern compilers. We taught machine code and assembly, right? And so now we'll teach how do you coordinate agents and how do you architect systems and how do you probably take some Java development classes, kind of like when I was in college, I took machine code classes to understand how it really works under the covers. But you have to learn the new way. It's modernization. It's new challenge. You'll have to learn new challenges. And I think it'll be better because we're going to learn how to build stuff at scale, not just in terms of like the amount of load it can handle, but build.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, I believe that is very real and very powerful, but I also believe that there's going to be more software engineers in five years than there are now. And the reason I believe that is not because I think those people are wrong, but I think that what's going to happen is there's, first of all, there's just way more software that we need to build that can be built. And two, what's going to happen is the software engineers are going to be figuring out how to make it work at scale, how to make sure that systems can be maintained, how to make sure we understand how the Agentic workflows, what they actually built. And we need to modify them for the next way. No one's ever maintained an a gentle developed system for five years. No one's ever figured out how to make it scale. That's where all the work is. And when you combine that on, you know, we're going to build 10 times more software. That adds up to more people being required to do it. So I think both can be true.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, the technology can develop. I think there's a lot of wild extrapolations going on right now, which, you know, but I think that even if you don't meet the wild extrapolations, people are talking about, the market is still massive. And I think it's going to take a lot of innovation and good product work and good engineering work and good process work to make sure that the benefits that we can achieve these benefits even though it's not some wild extrapolation of some magic LLM that can do everything in the world.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then that cup happened and happened until we're 25, 30 meetings, 40 meetings in, I would flip it around and we would start with the agents and the new identity type and what customers were thinking about doing with agents and how they're seeing the potential of the digital worker and agents and all the confusion. And we wouldn't get to the other stuff. We had our big conference in the fall. And, you know, it was like the last vestiges of the old pitch followed by the agents. And after that conference, I just said, listen, we got to flip this around. People want to hear about the agents. That's the direction they're going and that's what we need to pivot and totally focus on.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last year I was in process of meeting all our 100 largest customers in person. And the purpose of the meetings was I wanted to tell them about our vision of this unified identity platform where we're the only ones in the industry that have all these capabilities across customer identity and governance and privilege. And at the same time, the teams were working on essentially agent identity. These meetings, I would pitch what I was talking about and then there would be interest and oh, we should look at this. We didn't know how far along you were. And then I started throwing in this agendic stuff at the end of the meeting. And whenever I would get to that, the people in the meeting would just stop and they would be like, wait, talk about that some more?”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, with all the changes with Agentic and people building agents and running models, it's up for grabs, which is crazy. So all this changed, and then you just look at what's going to be required in all this change, and you say these connections between all these agents and where they're running, the demand for that is going to be massive because there's going to be this onrush of a gentic capabilities and there's going to be new stuff that's built. There's going to be native vendors that come out of nowhere and take market share. There's going to be new markets. And so it's kind of a macro thing, but now it's like, all right, what do you know about the details of your company, Todd? What are you guys good at? You're good at building something that scales, building something that's reliable, building something that connects to a lot of different systems. How can you position yourselves in that new market? And I think that's the big essential things. That's the bet we're making.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The high order bit there is recognizing a world where everything in the stack is going to change. And I think it's kind of similar like when I started Okta. You never want to exactly follow the past because history doesn't repeat it rhymes. But a lot of it was I remember in 2009 I was looking at the world and saying, hey, you know, there's going to be a cloud version of everything in the stack. And what are the big unique opportunities there? And what's happening with Agentic, call it Agentic, is that everything is going to be revisited in this Agentic world, whether it's current solutions are going to be have a gentic capabilities. I mean, it's crazy. Like AWS, AWS is like the infrastructure business, the most unassailable business. That market is.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This into practice for me, the big decision we've been talking about is okay, Okta is going to chase the idea of being the framework for agents in the workforce. That's a huge market. It is so big that maybe you're not as worried about Sessocalypse as some of the other enterprise CEOs that I talk to because the market's going to grow so big. And we're going to force change the company from the top down to make sure that the rate of change is higher and we're all focused on this opportunity. How did you make that decision? Did you stare at the ocean for a while and you came to you in a lightning bolt? What was the process there?”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And for me, doing that in an effective way, having a detailed grasp of what's going on is incredibly important. So being in the details and it's at a scale where it's hard to know every little thing, but you can really dive into areas and get enough details throughout the year so that when it comes to make those big decisions that you've narrowed down and focused on you can use those details and use your judgment and trust your instinct to make good high quality decisions. It's the most important thing I do, deciding which decisions to make and getting a high success rate on them.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I really needed to get expert advice on a lot of things. And what I realized over those years is that my instincts were still pretty good and I probably should trust my instincts more. And so I think that's kind of the mode I've been in for the last three years. Yeah, the company's bigger than it's ever been. I'm managing a company that's bigger than ever managed by definition. But I think I've been leaning into my instincts more. And I think to inform those, and then to put more detail on that, I think two things are very important. One is that you have to decide which decisions to make. So that's really important. So there's a bunch of decisions that I shouldn't be involved and I shouldn't be making. The inverse of that is super important, which is the ones that I am making, I better focus on them and concentrate on them and really get those right.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're like casting them out amongst the guys. It's interesting. So when I started Okta, you know, I'd worked at Salesforce and I had a decent sized team there and felt like I was very decisive. I was like, we got to do something. Here are the options. Decide. And then I started Okta and I found something interesting. My decision-making process slowed down. And when I was thinking about why, it's like realized that when I was a Salesforce, my boss was always a safety net ultimately, right? It's like if I was going to make a bad decision, there was theoretically a boss to stop me. But when I started doing Okta and the company started getting successful, I was, you know, my decision was like the decision. And I better think about it and get it right. And so it slowed down, it slowed down. And then the company got bigger. And we got into this phase of, you know, we went public and got closer to a billion dollars of revenue. And then I kind of felt like maybe I didn't, I needed more input.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On the go to market side is functional. On the GNA side, it's functional. On the R&D side, it's by platform. We have two platforms. There's Octaplatform and Osero platform. And the R&D is by platform.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Boundaries, but you do try to take that into consideration. And then I think beyond that, I think a lot of people think things that people try to do with org charts, you know, whether it's get people aligned on goals and get a culture that is shipping things quickly is really not an org chart thing. It's a management thing. It's a leadership thing. And instead of moving the org around all the time, you'd be better spent to make sure you have the right management team and the right leadership team to instill those cultural elements versus taking your people team and telling them to move stuff around to have a more nimble culture. You probably should just like get the right managers.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the guiding principle is try to give the great people a area that they can be great in. So it's really kind of a people-driven org chart. It's like reward people, promote people, bring in new people, give them an area that could really excite them and motivate them. And it's kind of people-centric. The second principle is, where possible, try to cluster things so you minimize communication paths and you let people be more autonomous and small teams. I found that's pretty hard. I think pretty quickly there's, unless you have very distinct separate business units and really almost separate companies inside your company, it's pretty hard to cut down on the lines of communication. There's got to be lines of communication somewhere, and no matter how you slice the org, you're kind of moving around where the people have to cross org.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's very hard to break through and go broad. So, anyways, I think everything is getting bigger. I think a lot of the apps will have a gentic features. I think there's a new layer of digital workers. Now back to your question, which is like, what's going on with the SaaS apocalypse? The reality is there will be some losers and there will be some companies disrupted and there'll be new people take over categories that are now. But I mean, that's back to challenges and making it fun. That fires me up. And I think it fires up a lot of people too.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think the last thing is that there is a new layer, and that is the digital worker layer. And I'm sure some of the existing companies are going to make the leap and they're Kind of weren't born in the legacy way of building an app. I think it's hard when you grew up building an app in a certain functional silo. It's hard to build a digital worker because digital workers need to go across different things. That's why they're called workers. That's why they're not called one app. And so it's really hard for companies that have focused on collaboration or HR or one silo to say, hey, now my digital worker really can span all these silos. Because if you look inside those companies, the whole org structures of these companies and the politics of these companies are someone owns one silo.”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what people miss is that the pie is getting much, much larger. If you look at the amounts spent on software, it's about, if you do infrastructure and SaaS and everything, hyperscalers software, it's about 1.2 or 3 trillion, 1.2 trillion, roughly. If you look at the amount of people, the services, the IT services market, it's about 1.8 trillion. So the markets are getting bigger. We're going to be spending more of that money on software and the pie is getting bigger. That's one thing that's true. The second thing that's true is that every piece of technology in the stack, whether it's SaaS apps or whether it's devices or OSs or infrastructure, they're all going to get a gentic features. They're all going to do things more on their own. They're all going to be able to talk to more of them and they're going to optimize for”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Companies like Palantir and Snowflake and Databricks are doing so well. Because what they allow companies to do is instead of having to actually connect their authentic enterprise to all these separate systems, they pull it into one data warehouse. So that's one model. You can pull it all into one data warehouse and run the agents on that. But I think the longer term or scalable model is you actually have the right permissions and the right access tokens to the agents to access the data directly. So when you go back to the example of OpenClaw, it's like mindset, everyone knows what these things can do now. And you have to facilitate access. You have to facilitate making sure that these connections are made in a secure way and in a way that can be understood and monitored. And when things go too far, you can pull them back. And as you experiment in the lab, you can say, these are the connections we need. This is, you know,”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These companies are every enterprise is struggling with. It's like, hey, this stuff really needs to have my data, my 50 years of sales inventory and my customer data and my marketing data. And once it's all combined, these agents in this agentic layer can do things interesting. So the rails we're putting in place is actually, first of all, it sounds basic, but just giving enterprises a list of the agents they have. Sounds simple, but they need a list of the agents they have. And then they need a system of record and a list for the agents they could use. So what is Salesforce doing? What is ServiceNow doing? What is Claude doing? What agents do they have? And then, okay, now what are they connected to and making sure that we control and secure what the agents are connected to? Because, again, the tension is between more and more data, more and more connections. This is, by the way, why the”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's the chat GPT moment for agents. And then ChatGPT was the Netscape moment for AI. So it's very significant. And the biggest significance, I think, is it opened everyone's eyes to the art of the possible. My son's soccer game, the parents were talking about OpenClaw, and these aren't tech people. They're just talking about how they're going to automate all their tasks. And so these people are using in their personal lives and their consumers and their IT buyers at companies. So it's really eye-opening and definitional thing about what an aging can do and what it can be. And this doesn't tension, you know, when you get something like an open claw and you try to experiment with it and play around with it, you say, oh, it's really not that interesting unless it has my data, unless it's connected to everything. And this is exactly what”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you look at things like open claw, which obviously had a huge moment, and everyone is buying Mac Minis so they can air gap oak and claw from their production machine, and then they're just giving OpenClaw all of their logins and passwords on the Mac Mini. Do you see that, like I look at that and I'm like, you've accomplished nothing, right? You've given it all the access over here, and maybe it just doesn't have your file system with your photos on it, but it still has all the access to the tools. But that's where the excitement is, right? It's like the sort of like living on the bleeding edge of danger and saying the agent running on this machine can run overnight and invent its own tools and figure out solutions to problems. When you are looking at putting rails on that, it feels like you're actually going to foreclose some opportunities because we don't yet really know how the agents are going to work. How did you look at OpenCall and the way people were giving it permissions is that sort of culture organically developed?”
2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT