Okta CRO Jon Addison talks AI’s role in cybersecurity

Okta’s digital agents are spearheading the identity security company’s growth: It reported subscription growth of 11% YoY in its Q1 earnings, and, according to CRO Jon Addison, new product innovation now represents 25% of bookings.

“AI agents are rapidly becoming a new workforce inside every organization, creating a wave of identities that must be secured and governed alongside human users,” said Okta CEO and co-founder Todd McKinnon in a press release.

Addison sat down with Revenue Brew to discuss how AI agents are benefiting Okta’s customers, especially at a time when more and more companies want the most advanced methods used for their cybersecurity needs.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What role do you think AI should play in cybersecurity?

The question is how do enterprises think about the relationship between AI, agentic deployments, and the efficiency that they can create for them, but also how you manage their risk. That’s how it relates to security—and what we’ve seen over the last couple of years is that there has been a lot of top-down energy in businesses to get going with AI and agents. That’s driven a lot of bottom-up activity and innovation. What we’re seeing now is quite traditional when we see these big technology shifts that we have now a lag, where companies are investing in and addressing two things primarily. One is the governance gap, which is: How do we govern what these agents are doing? The second is much more about financial and the cost benefit of these agents and whether all of the innovation that’s been done is actually generating any financial benefit to companies. We’re right in the heart of that as companies are thinking about agents, security, and the cost benefit of them.

Do you see any challenges of onboarding customers who have hesitations around AI?

A lot of [companies are] just considering their options, so when they do that the considerations are actually quite complex. Bigger companies are really just defining their reference architectures for management of agents at an enterprise scale, and they’re being quite considerate around that, so it’s taken them some time to get there. They’re taking a lot of advice. Companies are just working at very different speeds. Digitally-forward companies they’re deploying agents in production now very regularly. They’re using agents for in-house needs, but they’re also using agents to manage how they service their customers and compete, so a lot of them need help.

We can build really robust capability fast for them to manage agents in the same way, so a lot of customers in our install base get there quite quickly. For prospects—net new customers—what it’s also allowing is that customers are thinking about how they modernize their identity management infrastructure to prepare them for the AI era. Aa lot of companies built up a patchwork of solutions to manage identity management. Some of them are still quite legacy, some of them are integrated, some of them are quite still risky. The AI opportunity is forcing companies to actually reconsider the foundations of the fabric which they’re managing all identities with.

Okta saw its subscription base increase 11% YoY in the first quarter. What contributed to that growth?

We’ve got really strong momentum in our business. We’ve had that for some time now. It’s largely the consequence of two or three things. Firstly, our new products are going really well—our new product innovation represents 25% of our bookings thereabout—so the new capabilities that we’ve been taking to our customers and prospects for some time are really popular and they’re driving great outcomes. It’s particularly the case in bigger customers that we’re seeing companies lean in and really invest in broad cloud-native independent platforms like ours for a very extensive set of use cases, so that’s driving bigger deals. Our big deal cohort continues to increase. Thirdly, we have two platforms, one that is very focused on B2E and workforce use cases. The other that’s much more about B2C and consumer. They’re Okta and Auth0—both very deep, both very relevant—and we specialized some time ago in go-to-market teams that are very focused on those

What’s your strategy in driving that growth?

[The first is] specialization when you go to market in the field. The two others that are probably more related to customer outcomes—the motion where we’re trying to extend the capability of our platform…how we’re landing a complete vision with our customers about how an identity security fabric from Okta can solve all their identity challenges. That’s a really big force multiplier for growth for us, and companies are looking at that as an option for them as they prepare themselves for AI.