Much of the market presents AI agents as an entirely new category of risk. In practice, an AI agent is software operating with its own credentials, connecting through the same systems your existing applications already use. Additionally, most of securing it is work your organisation already knows how to do.
One element is completely new. Even the most capable identity platform is deliberately scoped to leave certain layers to other tools and standards; this is a considered design decision, not a shortfall. Our role is to identify precisely which parts your existing stack already covers, implement those effectively, and set out a clear, honest plan for the rest.
The agent does things on behalf of a signed-in human, using that person's permissions. This could be a copilot reading your email, an assistant booking your meetings, an agent answering a customer on their own account.
This is Okta for AI Agents' home turf, and it's strong and available today. It identifies the human, brokers the agent's access to your apps, and keeps an audit trail. Most of the agents in a typical company right now are in this lane, and this is what we deploy.
The agent runs with no human behind it: a background automation, a data pipeline, a coding agent in a build system. The harder question here is proving which piece of software is really acting, because there's no human login to lean on.
This needs a different layer - the workload-identity and attestation world, built on emerging open standards. The identity platforms deliberately hand this off. This is where our honest advisory sits: we map it with you and point to who covers it, rather than pretend one product does everything.
Ten years as a specialist Okta partner, now the specialists in agentic identity. We tell you honestly what your identity stack secures and what it hands off, deploy the part that's ready today, and advise on the rest. Neutral, standards-based, and with no fear-selling.
