Okta's Jon Addison: Agent Rollout Sparks Identity Consolidation

Okta's Oktane event this year became the setting for a candid admission about how enterprises actually run identity. Jon Addison, the company's chief revenue officer, told theCUBE Research's Krista Case and co-host Rebecca Knight that years of stitched-together point solutions have left many customers spending heavily just to keep their tools talking to one another. That sprawl, he said, is exactly what makes the arrival of AI agents uncomfortable.

Addison frames the moment not as a brand-new problem but as an extension of identity work enterprises have done for years. Customers want to innovate quickly, he said, and feel pressure from the business to do so, yet they recognize that security requires visibility and control. Some organizations are already agreeing on reference architectures before deploying agents, while others have shadow agents running in production and need urgent help establishing access controls. Addison described the early phase as efficiency and augmentation for humans and workers, with a future in which autonomous agents explode in scale and demand different thinking.

The stakes, based on Addison's remarks, hinge on whether enterprises finish that foundational cleanup before agents become widespread. If consolidation lags behind deployment, the vulnerabilities he attributes to point solutions may persist even as agents gain broader access, a risk the identity industry appears positioned to address.