Strategic shift pays off as Okta bids to ease agentic AI threat
Off the again of its increasing agentic AI safety imaginative and prescient, id specialist Okta has turned in a strong third quarter with revenues up 12% to $742m (£562m) reversed a 12 month-ago multimillion greenback GAAP working loss, and booked GAAP internet earnings of $43m, up from $16m year-on-year.
In a sign that strategic choices taken earlier this 12 months could also be paying off, Okta additionally revealed it at present has a subscription backlog of over $4bn, with roughly $2.3bn of that determine set to be recognised within the coming 12 months.
Okta CEO Todd McKinnon, who proclaimed a number of quick weeks in the past that id safety and agentic AI safety are principally one and the identical, described a strong set of outcomes highlighted by continued energy with massive clients and adoption of its new merchandise.
Talking to Pc Weekly forward of the outcomes announcement, president and COO Eric Kelleher stated: “Popping out of final 12 months we had an essential shift in technique. We’d realised that going out to This fall [1 November 2024 – 31 January 2025] our product innovation had accelerated to the purpose the place it was placing a burden on our gross sales organisation to should promote all merchandise to all individuals.
“We made a major change to specialise our go-to-market organisation on two purchaser personas, the enterprise purchaser, primarily chief info officers [CIOs] and chief info safety officers [CISOs] and the developer purchaser, and specialising our platforms as effectively – the Auth0 platform for builders and the Okta platform for CIOs and CISOs.”
Kelleher stated that primarily based on that, Q1 2026 had been broadly on-track, Q2 had proven enchancment, and Q3 was “strong in opposition to our plans and expectations”.
He stated the agency was now having extra profitable conversations with each of its core audiences and described id safety as by no means having been extra essential – one thing patrons are beginning to recognise too, significantly those who have deployed a number of level options for various id situations.
“They’re in search of an id companion that may assist them resolve all these use instances with a single pane of glass … so we give them the executive layer to make their companies safer.
“If you add to that the trade momentum round brokers and folks now having a model new downside to unravel with how they safe the id of brokers which can be deployed of their environments, we’re very optimistic for what the longer term holds for us,” he added.
AI bubble?
Amid extra ambient chatter about an AI bubble – the Organisation for Financial Cooperation and Growth’s (OECD’s) newest forecast for the US talks of a key threat to its projections being a “correction to fairness markets which have been buoyed by the hopes of excessive returns to funding in AI” Kelleher stated there could be winners and losers at each stage of the AI world sooner or later, however that no matter who they might turn into, AI brokers are usually not going away.
“Individuals are going to have brokers deployed … and the existence of the brokers is what creates the necessity for a platform to safe their identities, no matter no matter bubble there could or is probably not,” he stated.
