Strategic shift pays off as Okta bids to ease agentic AI risk
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Nine months after restructuring its go-to-market, Okta is buoyed by a growing recognition of how crucial identity has become thanks to the spread of AI agents.
Off the back of its expanding agentic AI security vision, identity specialist Okta has turned in a solid third quarter with revenues up 12% to $742m (£562m) reversed a 12 month-ago multimillion dollar GAAP operating loss, and booked GAAP net income of $43m, up from $16m year-on-year.
In a signal that strategic decisions taken earlier this year may be paying off, Okta also revealed it currently has a subscription backlog of over $4bn, with approximately $2.3bn of that figure set to be recognised in the coming 12 months.
Okta CEO Todd McKinnon, who proclaimed a few short weeks ago that identity security and agentic AI security are basically one and the same, described a solid set of results highlighted by continued strength with large customers and adoption of its new products.
Speaking to Computer Weekly ahead of the results announcement, president and COO Eric Kelleher said: “Coming out of last year we had an important shift in strategy. We’d realised that going out to Q4 [1 November 2024 – 31 January 2025] our product innovation had accelerated to the point where it was putting a burden on our sales organisation to have to sell all products to all people.
“We made a significant change to specialise our go-to-market organisation on two buyer personas, the enterprise buyer, primarily chief information officers [CIOs] and chief information security officers [CISOs] and the developer buyer, and specialising our platforms as well – the Auth0 platform for developers and the Okta platform for CIOs and CISOs.”
Kelleher said that based on that, Q1 2026 had been broadly on-track, Q2 had shown improvement, and Q3 was “solid against our plans and expectations”.
He said the firm was now having more successful conversations with both of its core audiences and described identity security as never having been more important – something buyers are starting to recognise too, particularly those that have deployed multiple point solutions for different identity scenarios.
“They’re looking for an identity partner that can help them solve all these use cases with a single pane of glass … so we give them the administrative layer to make their businesses more secure.
“When you add to that the industry momentum around agents and people now having a brand new problem to solve with how they secure the identity of agents that are deployed in their environments, we are very optimistic for what the future holds for us,” he added.
AI bubble?
Amid more ambient chatter about an AI bubble – the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD’s) latest forecast for the US talks of a key risk to its projections being a “correction to equity markets that have been buoyed by the hopes of high returns to investment in AI” Kelleher said there would be winners and losers at every level of the AI world at some point, but that regardless of who they may turn out to be, AI agents are not going away.
“People are going to have agents deployed … and the existence of the agents is what creates the need for a platform to secure their identities, irrespective of whatever bubble there may or may not be,” he said.
