Defining the secure agentic enterprise

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It's acid compliant, enterprise-ready, and built to ship AI apps fast. It's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500 for a reason. Ask any developer. It's a great freaking database. Start building at mongoDb.com slash bu ild. Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Ipatel, editor-in-chief of the Verge and, Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Todd McKinnon, the co-founder and CEO of Okta, a platform that lets companies manage security and identity across all the apps and services their employees might use. Think of it like login management. Actually that's a great way to think about it, because the way most people encounter Okta is that it's the thing that makes you log in again right before joining a meeting several times a week, which makes you late and then you have to apologize. Can you tell we use Okta? Anyhow, all that is a big business. Okta has a $14 billion market cap. But big software as a service companies like Okta are suddenly under a lot of pressure in the age of AI. After all, why would you pay their fees when maybe you could just vibecode your own tools to do similar things? This is the so-called SAS Pocalypse, and Todd himself recently said he was paranoid about it on Okta's most recent earnings call. So we dug into it, and how he's putting that paranoia into practice inside Okta, what he's changing, and what new opportunities he's going off to to head off the apocalypse. The biggest opportunity that Todd's thinking about is some deep decoder bait. The idea that it's not just people who's access and security credentials need management, but also AI agents inside a corporation. This concept has really gotten traction recently with the rise of OpenClub, which comes with a ton of security challenges. Can any company keep their users, platforms, and data safe if people are just gonna go buy a Mac Mini, hand it all their credentials, and let open cloud do its thing? Is simply installing a kill switch at the agent or login level, as Todd suggests, going to be enough? You'll hear Todd say that agent identity is something between a person and a system, which is in fact some of the richest decoder bait possible. So we spent some time digging into that. It also seems like we're on the cusp of some of the goofiest orc chart ideas in history, as folks start to manage hybrid teams of people and agents. And I wanted to know how Todd was thinking about that inside of Okta. Like so many of our guests recently, it's clear that Todd's a decoder fan. So this one got deep about the very nature of building software itself and what it means to run a software company in 2026. That's right. The Okta episode got emotion. Hang on. It might surprise you. Okay, Okta CEO Todd McKinnon. Here we go. Todd McKinnon, you're the co-founder and CEO of Octa.. Welcome to Decoder Thank you for having me, Neila. It's great to be here. I'm excited to talk to you. Uh I feel like a real theme of Decoder lately is uh just me being emotional about the nature of software in 2026. And I can't think of anyone better to do it with than you because when I think of uh emotional software development, I think of big enterprise software CEO s. I'm going to start with your emotions actually. Oh yeah. A few weeks ago massive groups of people, so late on. Well you you did. Here we go. We're gonna we're gonna just jump right into it. A few weeks ago, Octahead Earnings, you're on the call. They asked you about the SAS pocalypse, which I want to talk about in detail, but this was your response to SAS pocalypse. This is why I was starting the feelings. You said, quote, we are paranoid, and we're making sure that we're using all the latest technologies, LLMs, etc., to make sure that we have something that's resilient and secure, but has the best features and best capabilities. This is you talking about a gentic software development is real. The idea that our customers would build their own tools instead of paying us for these tools is real. We're paranoid about it. We've got to compete with that. That's a big thing to say. Talk about where you are in SAS Pocalypse, because I I I I want to start there and then I want to zoom out to basically the the nature of software in general. But that feels like a big thing for you to say. Like you need to be paranoid about this threat. Uh let's start with me personality wise and m how I operate. I'm very much challenge driven and I think a lot of people are uh in our business and just like what's the next challenge. Uh and what I see right now in the world is huge challenge and a huge opportunity. It's like a huge mountain to climb. And that is at a h uh the fundamental level is that the I believe strongly that the pie for technology is expanding greatly. Like the pie that what we can do for people and companies with AI and you know, the the common things talk about people talk about agents and um I mean this is a massive change, massive disruption. It's bigger than cloud computing. It's you know you could talk about is it as big as the internet? It's big . So now now capturing that and and leading a company that thrive I mean a company Okta's had decent amount of success, three billion in revenue, um growing over 10 percent last year, established brand, 20,000 customers. We've had some decent success. I think the opportunity going forward with all this change and all this disruption is is massive. It's huge. Technology's getting way bigger. There's all kinds of new categories I think are emerging. So for me personally, it's an incredible opportunity and challenge to lead the company through this and to go from what is, you know, like a mid-sized successful SaaS company to be what I think could be one of the most important companies in the world. So that's a huge challenge. It's a huge opportunity. It's also daunting because at some way it'd be greater it'd be great if n things didn't change that much and kinda our locked in position was you know, more stable and we could plug along, but there's a huge prize. The prize is massive and that's incumbent upon us to face this challenge and to go get it. You've talked about this in terms of the pie. about Okta in that in that market as it's growing. I I know you have some announcements about agents and verifying agents and having kill switch for agents that I want to talk about. I just want to come back to SAS Pocalypse in general. I understand SASPocalypse for a run-of-the-mill productivity tool. We use a lot of run of the mill productivity tools here at The Verge. They're all fine, right? And I'm always joking that enterprise software COs don't love coming on the show because I'm always like I want to be run Right? It's but they're all fine. Like you can uh you can take one piece of project tracking software and replace it with another and the idea that you're gonna get anything more than a five percent productivity improvement, I think has has always been illusory. Maybe you'll get some better pricing. The idea that I can just vibe code a Trello and now I don't have to pay Trello because I just have a Trello. Like I understand that argument. Okta to me has seemed much more insulated from that. Right? Because you're you have identity and you have to protect you have to do security at a scale that most people can't consider doing security. There's a lot of reasons why me paying you to take that liability on is a good business regardless of whether I can build it myself for cheaper. What specifically has you paranoid about agentics software and your customers building their own tools Oak like Okta? Because to me that's actually a little more opaque. I mean if you look at what these tools can do, it it's amaz ing. The cloud code and co-work and uh codex and th these are I mean from my I grew up as a software engineer, and that whole world is being revolutionized. So I built a company as a product developer and as an engineer. And so if you don't question and look at how you've built your own company and thinking and realize that that world is changing, you're just na ive. Now, we can talk about the reasons why I think Okta is very well positioned and has attributes of the market and attributes of the product that make it uh very resilient and hard to replace, but the just gotta look at the technology and look at what look at what's possible. And if you're not if you're not circumspect about what got you here and what your modes are and what the upstart would be doing if they were trying to compete with you. I think you're just naive. So I think it's a healthy paranoia. I when you look at the business, I think there's the features and functionalities of functionality of our products. And then one thing that's maybe misunderstood about what we do, or maybe the buyers understand it, but in general might be misunderstood. You can build the features and functions, but you the last thing you have to do is you have to connect it to everything. Thousands and thousands of different applications and services and pieces of infrastructure. It has to be connected to the last mile. So that is, you know, and that and that always changes. So you have to keep that integrated and you have to make sure it's always up to date with the latest changes of all the ecosystem. And so the integration part. And then this other part is that it really it has to work. It's mission critical. So even if if you know if you're building something that look looks like Okta, getting the features Making sure it works 100% of the time is is takes years and years and years. And is there also a reputational thing? It's like, what are you gonna trust? Are you gonna trust the hard, the proven solution that's been out there for years, or are you gonna trust something that your team just cooked up? So infrastructure software in general and then cyber software, I think, is also very well insulated from people vibe coding it themselves just because, you know, you you're talking about things that are purchased on uh there's a lot of a brand that goes into it. Like what cyber company do you trust? What cyber company do you trust to be uh secure itself to what cyber company do you trust to be up to date on all the latest threats and and then people that are buying cyber tools they're gonna have to look at their bosses and their boards of directors and say, what did you pick? Oh we got breach. Well, what did you pick? Well, I wanted to save a little bit of money to vibe code it. So that the the category of security and infrastructure software, I think, is a little bit different from some of the app app categories that you were talking about. There's a little bit of no one ever got fired for picking IBM in there, and then I think more cynically there's I want a vendor for the stuff that is rich enough for me to sue them if something goes wrong. Right? Like there the it's it's in there. I I I you know I hear it from the industry. Um can or the m the more like glass half full would be can support me. Yeah, it's it's one or the other. It's uh yeah your job is to have the glass be half full. Uh I have the other job. I'm trying to connect the dots between what sounds like a good case for being insulated from the market, and what you're describing is healthy paranoia. Like there's a new generation of software tools that will help people build competitors to Okta, whether those competitors are just the next N plus one SaaS competitor, or whether it's the internal team in a company saying we'll build our own identity solutions. What's the mechanism that is leading you to say we have to be vigilant? Is it the new generation of SaaS companies will just be cheaper? They'll have fewer people and they'll build something comparable to Okta that is just vastly cheaper per seat. Is it the companies will realize, oh, we can just build all these connectors and cloud code is going to traverse our intranet and lock people in manually? And maybe that'll be more costly in tokens but the front end will be cheaper. If you have the insulation, what is the mechanism that might be a threat to Okta? I compartmentalize it in two different areas. The first area is just uh and probably the more important area is is job as a CEO is most important job is like figure out strategy, which means which market you're gonna be in and how you're gonna win in those markets. And for us, this there's a big new emerging market which which is AI agents need to log into stuff. And AI agents need to be uh you need to have a system to keep track of them and define their role and define their permissions and what they can connect to and what they can do. So that's a big new market. So getting the company oriented on that massive new market, and that's one bucket, which markets. The second bucket is how we execute to go capture that market. And I think the main theme in the second bucket is it's it sounds basic, but I think basics are important, which is it's very clear that especially in software development and innovation, the technical shift is very significant. So the number one thing that organization has to do is is turn the dial in terms of how much change it will absorb. So in normal operating mode, let's say you want 20% change, 80% stays the same, you need to turn that dial up now. You need to change more, whether that's the your team structure, whether that's processes, whether that's the technology you're using, you have to turn up the change quotient. So what I tell the team is it's gotta be at least 60-40, if not more. Um and then with that it's like you give them the freedom to experiment with new technology, you know, learn from what's happening out there. By the way, I think one of the most important things is, you know, while you have a healthy appreciation for the change and the impact, you can fall victim to believing what you see online or what you what you hear. You know, because everyone's trying to sell something. Everyone's trying to make their company sound cool and they're like they're embracing the change. So when you hear companies, you know, especially big company CEOs say, oh, you know, uh AI is writing 90% of our code right now. I mean, they're trying to sell something, whether it's their own uh substance as a leader or their own organization's ability to innovate. So you gotta take that with a grain of salt and say, hey, the art of the possible, but like w you know, as we change, what are we embracing, what's working for us, what's not. But it kinda all comes back to giving the teams freedom to change. And change is hard. It sounds trite, but you really as a leader you have to force it sometimes. Tops down mandates, right? I like to be bottoms up and empower people, but sometimes to get change happen, you have to push it. It sounds very specifically like you think the change here is there's going to be a universe of agents doing work inside of companies and they need to be permissioned and controlled and Okta should focus on that. And you're not so worried about, hey, a bunch of people are going to vibe code their own tools or a bunch of cheaper competitors are gonna come up and disrupt us because they vibe coded a competitor Okta. Like it seems like you're bracketing that and saying that's not a big problem for for Okta right now. We have the opportunity to win this battle to be the identity layer for AI agents. And if we win that, that could easily be the biggest category in cyber. I mean, cyber is about $280-ish billion dollars a year. Identity management is about, depending on whose number you believe, it's roughly 10% of that. This new agent layer could be the biggest category in cyber by far. So yeah, winning that is is is job number one for our company. Tell me your calibration on how much it's acceptable to lose the identity piece of your business to whatever vibe coding SASPOCLYPS people think in order to win the bigger market in uh agent control. Because right now, you know the argument is why would anyone keep paying you monthly or yearly for X number of seats when they can pay a lower fee to some solution that someone has built cheaper? And then once that's done, it's done and you don't have to pay annually. Why would anyone keep paying you for that if you think the market is bigger for agents? Aaron Powell They're not mutually exclusive. Um I think the attributes we talked about, whether it's uh reliability, trust, integration, capabilities, you know, does the vendor you're gonna trust have enough money to to support you? Um that's that's a foundational thing in both of these markets, whether it's people identity for customers and partners and employees or it's this new identity type of agents and facilitating that. So they're not mutually exclusive. But I think that that w when I what's happening in the world right now is every organization is is it's it's interesting. They're they're I think I'd say they're universally uh aware of the potential of the agentic enterprise, which is essentially they want to make things more automated and they want to enhance their digital or enhance their workforce with digital employees or they want to add new digital employees. So they're all clearly aware of this. They're getting a very mixed set of signals and a very messy story about how they do it. There's a combination of, you know, the big platforms, Amazon, Microsoft, Google are gonna sell me agents. It's not even actually clear what an agent is, Salesforce has agent force, ServiceNow has agents, every um SaaS company is building agents. So they're they're trying to sort through it all. But what they see is that they see a tremendous opportunity to automate things and to um basically take labor budget and divert it into technology budget and make their companies grow faster and be more efficient. And they're and now what they're looking for is okay, what are the foundational building blocks to wire that all together and make it work? What are the rails? Yeah. Um and so that's where the big opportunity is to get take the first steps on this, you know, what could be the biggest category of cyber. When you look at things like uh open claw which obviously had a huge moment and everyone is buying Mac minis so they can air gap open claw from their production machine and then they're just giving open claw 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 you've 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? Is 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 open call and the way people were giving it permissions? Is that sort of culture organically developed and how does it informing your thinking about building for agents at OctaNow? It's the chat GPT moment for agents. It's you know, and then chat GPT was the Netscape moment for AI So it's it's very significant. And and the biggest significance I think is it it opened everyone's eyes to the art of the possible. You know, my my son's soccer game, the parents were talking about OpenClaw, and these aren't tech people.' There justy talking about how they're gonna automate all their tasks. And so these people are using in in their personal lives and their consumers and their IT buyers at companies. So it's it's really eye-opening and define definitional thing about what an aging can do and what it can And there's this attention, you know, when you 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 these companies are every enterprise is f is is struggling with. It's like, hey, this stuff really needs to have my data, my fifty fifty years of sales inventory and my consumer my customer data and my marketing data, and once it's all combined, these agents in the Sugentic layer can do things interesting. So what the rails we're putting in place is actually, first of all, it sounds basic, but just giving enterprises a a list of the agents they have sounds simple, but they they need a list of the agents they have. And then they need a system of record and a list for, you know, the agents they could use. So what is Salesforce doing? What is ServiceNow doing? What is Cloud doing, what agents do they have? And then 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 why the 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 AgenTic 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 of OpenClaw, it's like uh mindset, it everyone knows what these things can do now. Um 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, we should add more here. We should change this. We should filter this permission. That's what companies have to do. And that's that's the what we're that's the rail, those are the rails we're trying to put in place. Aaron Powell When I said this was going to be an emotional conversation on software development, the nature of our relationship to databases is at the very heart of that existential crisis that I I feel every week on this show. Let me uh just get your answer to this directly. It sounds like you're saying Sasspocalypse might be real, but it's not real for Okta in the way that most people think SESPocalypse is real. I think the what people miss is that the the pie is getting much, much larger. If you look at uh the um amounts spent on software, it's you know, it's about if you do infrastructure and SaaS and everything, hyperscalers, software, it's about, you know, 1. 2 or 3 trillion, 1.2 trillion roughly. If you look at the amount of people, the services, the so IT services market, it's about 1.8 trillion. So the markets are getting bigger. You know, we're 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 uh that every piece of technology in the stack, whether it's SAS apps or whether it's uh devices or OSs or infrastructure, they're all gonna get agentic features. They're all gonna do things more on their own. They're all gonna you're gonna be able to talk to more of them and they're gonna opt And I think the last thing is that there is a new layer, and that is the digital worker layer. And you know, some I'm sure some of the existing companies are gonna make the leap and they're gonna have real digital workers that are in there, you know, come from uh Microsoft and Salesforce and Amazon. I think it's probably more likely it's gonna come from companies that aren't uh kind of weren't born in the in the legacy way of building an app. You know, I think it's hard when you're 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, you know, 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. 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 um apps will have agentic 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 uh there'll be new people take over categories that are now um but I I mean that's you know back to challenges and making it fun that's that's fires me up and I I think it fires up a lot of people to o. We have to take a quick break here, we'll be right back . Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer-first, asset compliant, enterprise-ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500, and that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash bu ild. Support for this show comes from Framer. If updates to your site are feeling harder than they should, Framer is the shortcut you've been looking for. 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Don't know the difference between matte paint finish and satin, or what that clunking sound from your dryer is? With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro. You just have to hire one. You can hire top rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today . The world moves fast. Your workday? Even faster. Pitching products. Drafting reports. Pilot is your AI assistant for work, built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create, and summarize. So you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more at Microsoft.com/slash M three sixty five cop ilot. Welcome back. I'm talking with Octa CEO Todd McKinnon about org charts and how deeply weird they're starting to get in the age of agentic A I. You have brilliantly opened the door to the decoder questions by talking about org charts. I actually think we're on the cusp of some some of the weirdest org charts we've ever seen. So tell me about Okta. What was your org chart in the past? I mean, you you founded the company. I'm sure you've gone through many iterations of it. Where are you at now? And as you talk about changing the balance of change of the company, how are you changing your org chart? I think the guiding principle is uh is try to give the great people uh area that they can be great in. So it's really kind of a uh people driven org chart. It's like reward people, promote people, bring in new people, give them give them an area that could really an excite them and motivate them. And it's kind of people centric. The second principle is is uh w where possible, try to cluster things so you you minimize communication paths and you let people be more autonomous in small teams. I found that's pretty hard. Um I think pretty quickly there's unless you have very um 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, no matter how you slice the org, you're you're kind of moving around where the people have to cross org boundaries. But you do try to take that into consideration. And then I think beyond that, I think a lot of um people think things that people try to do with org charts. You know, whether it's um get people aligned on goals and get a culture that is shipping things quickly is it's really not an org chart thing. It's a management thing. It's a leadership thing. And you'd better you 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 you know 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. So this I mean this is my joke on Dakota, right? If you tell me the structure of a company, I can tell you 80% of your problems. Because the the tensions just exist in certain structures in predictable ways. And it's that last 20%, which is priorities and leadership and management. So it sounds like you're pretty functionally structured, but how is Okta actually structured? Are you structured by business line? Is it uh or do you just have like a crack AI team that's off in the corner? Like how does this all work? On the go-to-market side, it's functional. Um on the GNA side it's functional. On the RD side, it's it's by platform. We have two platforms. There's Octa platform and OZero platform. And the RD is by platform. The other question I ask everybody who comes on a coder is about decisions. Again, you're it's great it's always great to have a founder because you your your frameworks change as you come up with a company. How do you make decisions? What's your framework and how has that changed over time? I would say the this is uh we're we're really talking, we're doing introspection here. Um I told you to be emotional. Yeah. This is decoder. Decoder is just therapy for me personally. I uh it's at this point, it's just like you you can tell what my problems are, right? But it's interesting. So when I started Okta, you know, I'd worked at Salesforce and I had a you know decent sized team there and felt like I was very decisive. I was like, we gotta do something, here are the options, decide. And then I started Okta and I f found something interesting. I my decision making process slowed down. And I I when was thinking about why, it's like I feel realized that when I was a Salesforce, my boss was always a safety net. Ultimately, right? It's like if I was gonna make a bad decision, there was theoretically a boss to 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 um, you know, we went public and got close to a billion dollars of revenue. And then I kind of felt like maybe I didn't uh I needed more input 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, it's the company's bigger than it's ever been. I'm managing a company that's bigger than I've ever managed by definition, but uh I think I've been leaning into my more inst my instincts more. And I think to inform those and there's and then to put more you know detail on that, I think two things are very important. One is that you you have to decide which decisions to make. So that's really important. So there's a bunch of decisions that I should I shouldn't be involved in I shouldn't. The inverse of that is super important, which is the ones that I that I am making, I better focus on them and concentrate that concentrate on them and really get get those right. And for me, doing that an effective way, having a detailed grasp of what's going on is incredibly important. So being in the details and you know it's 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, you know, use those details and use your judgment and trust your instinct to make to make good high-quality decisions. It's the most important thing I do, dec deciding which decisions to make and getting a a a high success rate on them. Put this into practice for me, the big decision we've been talking about is okay, Okta is gonna 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 CESPocalypse as some of the other enterprise CEOs that I talked to because the market's gonna grow so big and we're gonna force change at 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? Was it what did you stare at the ocean for a while and it came to you in a lightning bolt? Like what what was the process there? The high order bit there is recognizing uh recognizing a world where everything in the stack is gonna change. Um and I think w it's not kinda it's kinda similar like when I started Okta, not I mean, you never want to exactly follow the past because history doesn't repeat it rhymes. Um but a lot of it was I remember in 2009 I was looking at the world and and saying, hey, you know, there's gonna be a cloud version of everything in the stack. And what are the big unique opportunities there? And what's happening with, you know, a agentic, call it agentic, is that everything is gonna be revisited in this agentic world, whether it's current solutions are going to be have agentic capabilities. I mean, um, you know, it's crazy. Like AWS. AWS is like the infrastructure business, the most unassailable business. That market is, you know, with all the changes with agentic and people building agents and running models, it's kind of it's up for grabs, which is crazy. So all this change and then you just look at what's gonna be required in all this change and you say i it's it's these connections between all these agents and where they're running, the the demand for that is going to be massive because there's going to be this onrush of agentic capabilities. And there's going to be new stuff that's built, there's gonna be native vendors that come out of nowhere and take market share. There's gonna be new markets. And so it's kind of a it's a macro thing, but now it's like, all right, and 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. Um, where how can you position yourselves in that new market? And I think that's, you know, that those are the big essential things. It's that's the bet we're making. Take me inside the moment though, right? You you're realizing this happens. Did you write an email? Did you open a Google Doc? Did you just dictate to chat GPT and send say fire off an email from me, agent? Like how did that actually work at the company? Last year I was in process of meeting uh meeting all our hundred 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 and at the same time the the company the the teams were working on essentially you know agent identity. And um these meetings I would I would pitch what I was talking about and then there would there'd be interest in the you know oh we we should look at this, we should we didn't And then I started throwing in this agency stuff at the end of the meeting. And whenever I would get to that, the comp the the uh the people in the meeting would just stop and they'd be like, wait, talk about that some more? Um and then that kept happening and happening until we know where you know 25, 30 meetings, 40 meetings in, I would flip it around and we would start with the agents and the 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 the old pitch followed by the agents. And after that conference, I just said, listen, we gotta we gotta flip this around. This 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. All right. So let me ask you the my crash out questions about all of this. Here's my my first one. And you're a great person to ask this question too, because you build a lot of software, you've built a company around building software, like very bespoke, very complicated software. And you're trying to sell a lot of software to people who, like you said, would like to replace labor with uh technology, right? And that is there's a lot there. I'm looking at the state of the art in AI right now, and I see some cool stuff happening, and I find myself constantly wondering: can the LLM technology we have today that is the foundation of all of these AI systems, can it bear the weight of our expectations? Can it actually, on any reasonable timeline, do all of the things that people think it can do? Because I can see it doing some things, and then I see it just hit walls over and over again. And I say, well, if it's brittle, people are not going to adopt it because that brittleness is exactly where you want a human being to just be available, to overcome whatever boundary the AI is going to find, find for itself. And I can give you examples, but I'm curious if you see that broadly and if you think the technology can actually develop to the point where the market becomes as big as what you're describing. Absolutely. The technology can develop. I think there there's a lot of wild extrapolations going on right now. Um which, you know, uh but I don't I think that the 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 to make sure that the benefits that we can we can achieve these benefits even though it's not some wild extrapolation of some magic LLM that can do everything in the world. Aaron Powell So I I I see one example, right? Every software developer I know is like, especially the senior ones are like I'm now just describing software. Like I'm just like writing Yeah, that's a great example. That's a great example. So now I I believe that is very real and very powerful, but I also believe that there's gonna 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 how to make sure that systems can be maintained, how to make sure we understand how the agentic workflows what what they actually built. And how and we need we we need to modify them for the next way. No one's ever maintained an agentically developed system for five years Where are those people gonna learn how to do it? You've already described this, right? The traditional career path, the traditional org chart is breaking down. I think Meta announced that like one manager will now oversee 50 ICs. When I say we're on the cusp of some wild org charts, that's what I mean. Like some very strange corporate structures are gonna blossom here. If the problem is, okay, no one's ever maintained in a genetic system for five years and we need more developers to do it. Where are all those developers going to learn the skills to evaluate the code that agents are are writing and and deploying and saying, okay, you got it wrong, here's how you need to maintain it? Aaron Powell It's you know it's maybe not what everyone says, 'cause people like to extrapolate and say everything in the world is changing, the education system's gonna change, everything's gonna change. I think a lot of the things where people learn they'll learn, like in in college, I think we'll still teach computer science. It'll just be different. Just like you know, 50 years ago we didn't teach uh modern compilers. We taught 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 you know you'll probably take some uh you know Java development classes kinda like when I was in college I took machine code classes to understood how it really works under the covers. But you have to learn the new way. It's modernization. It's um new challenge. You'll have to learn new challenges. And I think it'll be better because we're gonna learn how to build stuff at scale, and not just in terms of like the amount of load it can handle, but build a large complex system at scale, learning that in college and learning that on your on the job and uh people that are early in their career leveling up. And you know, there's also this narrative out there that oh, we don't need any entry level developers anymore. That's you know 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 learned 10, 15 years ago didn't. So when I think about the value of agents going out in the world, as you've described, they're 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 uh 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. Right? 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 and it will give me some insights. And the answer in consumer maybe is no, right? Like uh Google Photos just walked back its AI search because it turns out people would prefer the regular search. And I I don't know which one is gonna win out over time and where it habits for everybody across work and their personal lives will change. But the notion that the database is the important thing in that's where the value is because anybody can ask an agent to go make up a spoke piece of software to do some business function. Doesn't it seem likely that the database vendors will just raise their prices or increase the barriers to access or find other ways to extract more value from having that that data because that's what all the agents really need access to. There's I think there's data and then there's intelligence. And I think a lot of the intelligence is is now in the past has been codified in the application. Raw database is is not that helpful. I mean when you say you want to talk to the database, what you're really saying is you you want some kind of analysis or intelligence done by something. Yeah. You don't want to you don't want to have the ones and zeros in, you know, in m gigabytes of data coming at you. Um so you're really talking about intelligence. And that's the that's the big debate about SaaSpocalypse, who's gonna do that intelligence. Is it is it the app vendors we have now? I mean even even you know I mentioned the data warehouse companies like Databricks and Snowflakes and Po Snowflake and Palantir, they're they're not really I mean they're selling essentially they're selling some kind of intelligence. They're not the the valuable part of their business is not the is not the ones and zeros. So the question is like w who's gonna do the intelligence and I think that the application companies are gonna add some to their you know um capabilities and there's gonna be new ones. And there's gonna be new ones that intelligence actually becomes work, not in the sense of, you know, app work, but sense of work people would have done . We're gonna pause here for one more quick break. We'll be back in just a minute . At EDF, we don't just encourage you to use less electricity. We actually reward you for it. That's why when you use less during peak times on weekdays, we give you free electricity on Sundays. How you use it is up to you. EDF, change is in our power . Households are ship we stay heat used by 40% can earn up to 16 hours of free electricity points. Subject to fair usage cap. All two is EDF Energy.com forward slash R Hyphen Pow er. Hi, I'm Brene Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning. It's gonna be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree, and we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursda y. This week on Networth and Chill, it's my birthday and I'm turning 32, so I'm sharing 32 life lessons I've learned that have actually changed my perspective. These aren't the picture perfect Instagram infographic versions, these are the real hard, uncomfortable truths about money, career, relationships, and everything in between. I'll explain why choosing a rest day is non-negotiable or your body will choose it for you, why you should never take advice from anyone you don't want to be, and why nobody is actually looking at you so, you should just go for it. Plus, I'm breaking down why you should always negotiate your salary, why individualism is making you broke, and yes, why you should try eating a popsicle in the shower after a bad day. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or What's it like to talk to a digital twin of a relative who died before you were born? This week on Solutions with Henry Blodgett, I talked to writer and artist Amy Kurzweil about just that. She helped her father, famed inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, build a chat bot based on her grandfather. We discuss how increasingly lifelike digital representations of people will change human relationships, especially how we grieve, and how AI is forcing us to reckon with what consciousness even means. Follow solutions with Henry Blodgett to hear our convers ation. Welcome back. I'm talking with Octus CEO Todd McKinnon about the uneven m,essy shift into a tech world, maybe driven by AI ag ents. When I'm saying I'm having like an existential crisis, like I have as a tech journalist, I have understood software in one way for my entire career and it's been a pretty good career because the software industry and the tech industry has grown so fast in the 15 years since we've started The Verge. But every conversation I've had decoder over the past few months is some CEO of like a web two point oh company that put a beautiful mobile app interface on top of a database and that thing felt like the application and they built huge businesses on top of it. And you can describe this in all kinds of way. We just had the CEO of Zillow on. Zillow is just a beautiful interface to a a database. And that's a really good business for them. I'm asking, okay, if you have agents and you're like, go find me a house and order me a sandwich, you're gonna end up in a place where it might just wanna use Zillow or it might want to cut Zillow out and go directly to the underlying. Or Zillow might build the killer agent. Or or Zillow might build the agent. And I'm just not sure how any of that plays out because what you're really doing is unbundling the data and the intelligence that acts upon the data and the interface to that data into three very different things and everybody still wants to make money and and not go out of business. And you're sitting right at the center of it, right? You're providing access to everyone. How do you see that playing out right now? A 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 is 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 Okta 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 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 it's such a challenge. It'd be much easier if if things were just stayed the same and we could kind of keep m keep like in our own little lanes and I I agree it it's exciting, especially because you're gonna s I think we're gonna see a wave of new companies and new ways of thinking and certainly we'll see new ways of computing, which that's why the verge exists. Like we were built around the the concept that mobile phones would be important, which when we launched the site was not people are like, What are you talking about? Like it's har it's hard to even say now, but that would this was like a real thing that we said that we got question marks around. What I would temper that with is when I have CEOs on the show and they say companies are interested in replacing their labor budgets with technology budgets, that is a pretty huge threat. When we talk about how much work will be automated by running around the agents and doing intelligence, I one, I wonder, well who will be spending all that money if no one is making any of that money. And then I think very importantly, this comes back to me asking about can LLMs do it, I wonder if any new ideas will be generated in that process at all. Right? If we're just going to automate our way into something that seems pretty boring, right? We're just going to run a bunch of business logic and no one at the bottom who's actually operating in business logic will think, oh, I could do this 10 times cheaper if I start my own company and go start a new company. And there's something about all of that that I think I hear from our audience is that's why AI pulls as badly as AI pulls, even though the opportunities look exciting. Aaron Powell There'll be a a wave of uh people building agentic systems and agentic systems to you know uh do the jobs people do now or help people do the jobs people do now, then that'll be another wave of 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 gonna 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 a Gentec from the start. So Oxa has announced a blueprint for AgenTech 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 an agent identity and an actual person. To standardized 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 talk to me about that first one. You want to create a new identity for agents in the workforce on your network. What does that look like? Is that how is it defined differently than an employee or a person? Agents are a new identity type and it's it's kind of like a combination of it has some attributes of a human identity and some attributes of a just a system. And it's basically a hybrid of both. And so it it definit from a definition perspective, it's pretty simple. I think where it gets interesting is it becomes a map that that centralizes the list of agents from all your vendors. So it can it can represent agents from all the big platforms. It can it gives you this central way to kind of keep track of it all. And that's what companies are struggling with. They they've they hear all the announcements and they're very excited about this, but they're 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. Some of them are totally headless and they're just on their own thing, automated 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 it's all kind of framed in this um in this concept of mapping across different silos. So you have 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 it can 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 all the different various technologies and then like you said, stuff is gonna go wrong and the there's gonna be uh issues and threats and prompt injection and when that happens it gives you the ability to essentially pull the plug, like take the connections away. You know, 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. How do you detect whether it's doing something you didn't expect? Aaron Powell 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. Um but we are we're working on standards for people to raise that issue. Or not um not not from a like from a technical sense, like raise an alert and and have the other elements of the system respond to that. So is the cool switch just we're we're pulling your access your firewall to get your stuff and go? Aaron Powell Right. So it's just saying we're we've revoked all your passwords agent. Yeah. Aaron Powell When you say the the agent identity is somewhere between a person and a system, go into that in more detail. 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 you know, just like you would give a person access to applications and then inside of those serv 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 use that. Um and some ki sometimes you want the agent to um 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 per like a person and some of them are, you know, only because there are these agents that can be on behalf of people or they can be connecting to other agents and they're more, you know, kind of like systems versus people. Aaron Powell When you look at how the agents operate, you know, 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 in the most deeply philosophical ways. But you know, anthropic is like very happy to hint that Claude is alive, right? When you think about okay, I is I'm a provider of identity to these systems that are a hybrid between people and 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? Aaron Powell We're pretty pragmatic about it. Meaning that it's we we know that they're the behavior of these systems is non-deterministic. And you have to it's 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, um, but then having the ability to rein it in when it it goes too far. I think that's the right uh ultimately that's the right um way to balance effectiveness of these systems and and the risk. There's no free lunch. Like you you have to give it the data if you want it to be effective. And you kind of have to decide if if you you have zero tolerance for non-deterministic behavior, you can't give it the data. You can't give it the permission. And so that's kind of the balance that we're helping customers strike. How do you think about, you know, Octus sits in the middle? You were talking about, I don't know there's there's Salesforce that has its own agents, there's other vendors that have their own agents. They are not gonna 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 claw 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. There's only one thing, it's it's customers. I mean customers have to have the the customers will have the leverage eventually. And if the customers in a m the in like a market mechanism don't have the leverage, the government will step in and do antitrust. I mean that well the reason we have the reason we have a software industry, do you know why we have a software indust ry? Because customers finally got fed up with IBM and said you have to sell software and operating systems and applications independent from the hardware. So this is like fifty, sixty years ago, seventy years ago. IBM is like, 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 finally the government stepped in and said, you gotta split it up. You gotta have operating systems, you gotta have hardware, you gotta 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 gonna 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 it's gonna be customers that demand change and if there's so much, you know, monopolistic lock-in that you know we have to rely on regulators to come in and fix it. Well I do think this is history that you've just made. You're the first CEO of a multi-billion dollar enterprise software company to advocate for vigorous antitrust enforcement and decoder. So I'm just gonna hold that close to my heart. If customers customers can't force the choice. Uh I do think the sort of like pre-Reagan antitrust environment that led to IBM being unbundled is very different than today, but we will set that aside. Uh uh But I did impress you with my historical reference. It was very good. Uh uh again, uh the reason I didn't answer your question correctly is uh very surprised that you went to antitrust. That doesn't usually happen on the show. Uh isn't there gonna be just some weird pricing war in the middle of all that where Microsoft says, sure, let your other vendor's agent into three sixty five,' were just gonna charge you a massive access fee to do it. Yeah, I think that's very likely. Yeah. Do you see that playing out now or you just think see it on the horizon? I don't I not yet what is happening now is that people are just getting familiar with the call it the the siloed agents. They're just getting familiar with the agents in Microsoft or the agents in Salesforce Salesforce. We're not really to the we're not really to the phase yet of really multi-silo agents, agents that can go from uh stovepipe to stovepipe and and do these w in the cases there are, but we're that agent or that uh era is still ahead of us. And I think as you get more to that era, some of these issues have become more significant. Aaron Powell Isn't 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 and coming up with some outcomes. Aaron Powell The thing about that and a lot I think a lot of these trends and ideas th remember is like y 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 uh OpenCloud was such a lightning in the 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, you know, that once their mindset gets set on the possible, then it's then it's up to uh industry to figure out how it all works under this covers, but people care about the possible in the apps. Um and I think that you you're gonna see it ripple through um I think it's it's like I said, I thought it was the chat GPT of agents and it's it's exciting. So you're kinda saying now is the time to build the guardrails and make sure these actually work. Can I ask you about the flip side of that? You know, the promise of agents broadly, AI maybe broadly, is we will we will re remove these intermediaries, right? The thing I keep saying is that the your computer will just go access the database is all on its own and you don't need these app intermediaries or whatever. And we're gonna reshape the app economy. Then I look at okay, there's a bunch of scammers online who are just setting up like fake hotel service numbers and calling grandparents and like stealing 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, that 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 gonna 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 octa is in, which is making sure it's a real person doing the thing they're supposed to do at the right time, isn't just totally up-ended by the amount of AI-powered fraud that's occurring. Aaron Powell 40% of our business is uh authenticating and validating customers, logging into customer websites and mobile apps. And this area is is changing a lot with AI as well. And I think what you're seeing is that the offline identity, driver's license, passport And I think it's coming at a great time too because it gives us a uh uh something to offer people that really want to do a better job differentiating between agents and open claw 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 they can you can do fancy things just like you do Apple Pay, you can do 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. Um or you know, in a better sense than 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 is not new. Um it's like the old the old problem on Twitter and X and you know, Elon Musk is is on 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 um these you know m national IDs and passports and mobile driver's license being digitized, we might have a a shot to actually bring some sanity to that world. There's some real debates there, right, about privacy, about surveillance, about what does it mean to actually digitize identity and uh from a like a credentials perspective. Trevor Burrus Are you guys in that mix? Is that something Octa is actively thinking about, or are you waiting for that to sort itself out. Aaron Powell I mean governments are deciding. And governments are d uh 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, it's in the United States, it's very much at a state level. Um 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 um how they should do it.