Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news, aws services are back up and running. This morning's outage underscoring though the needs for cybersecurity, I'll enter Octa as one player. The company says it's business has grown alongside the acceleration of cloud services. It now says it's on the lookout for rising AI
enabled threats. Joining me now is Tom McKennon, Octa CEO. Look, anyone can have an outage, but if you're providing cloud sources for thirty percent of you know, Corporate America and beyond, it's a little concerning. What went through your head when you saw this this morning?
Todd Well, I think about the world as layered into different critical services. Cloud infrastructure is one critical service, and as the lean, independent, neutral identity company, we're building this identity service for the entire world, whether that's enterprises, whether that's consumers, whether that's people building AI agents. We want to be that identity infrastructure. It's important for CyberSecure, it's important for business continuity, and it has to be reliable.
So how do you make sure that it's reliable.
Then a lot of redundancy and a lot of focus and a lot of making sure we do exactly what customers expect, whether it's backups, redundancy, and monitoring it continuously. It's very important for us.
Now you are growing very very substantially. What you've ate other people in San Francisco and how.
Many thousand around the world, six thousand global employees doing a great job for our customers every day.
Well love to hear it, and how I hope they are. How fast are you adding customers? And what's your pitch versus another security identity security company?
Yeah, it's an interesting perspective we have, and there's different perspectives on. Some vendors want to sell you everything across the entire application and platform stack. Some vendors want to
sell you everything across cybersecurity. We focus on identity, and we focus on verifying who the people are in your company, who the people are coming to your website as customers or prospects, and now really with AI agents, we make sure that that identity service is continuous across everything you're trying to automate in your business with AI too, and
that's our focus. And beyond that, we focus on connecting to everything else in the technology stack and letting our customers choose what they want to use.
What is the scale of AI agents Okta expects in the next twelve months.
It's starting out very strong, but it's going to be growing significantly. When you think about what companies can automate with these AI agents, how they can improve their top line revenue, how they can cut costs, how they can be more efficient, how they can serve their customers better, it's got tremendous potential.
What about your exposure to chat GPT user growth? You know how much of that you have and how is it changing how you do business?
Well, I think chat GPT is the perfect example of how much can be automated with AI. And when every company looks at that, they think, hey, we can make our customer experience better with adding chat GPT like capabilities, we can make our employees more productive. So it's really driving them to deploy, to deploy, to deploy, deploy more AI technology, and that means more identity is required. Those connections have to be secure, those connections have to be reliable.
So it's really an exciting time for the industry.
Is it still in the land grab phase? And if that's the case, which I think I think it is, then how do you make sure that you're the one doing the grabbing.
Well, I think it's really important that everyone understands how important identity management is to rolling up AI and AI agents.
I mean they only need one person to manage their identity, right.
Yeah, Well, it's important that the identity service connects to everything. It connects to every application in the back end, every development platform. One of the things about AI agents particularly is how you build these things is changing very rapidly. So we give our customers the ability to make sure they have security, governance and visibility, and then let them choose the rapidly evolving platforms behind the scenes to whatever
fits their needs. That's really core to everything we do, that choice and that flexibility.
What did the Google wiz palaw All to cyber Arc deal mean.
For you, Well, it's a different worldview. I think companies try to consolidate around everything in cyber We think that that's not the right approach. We think the right approach is to consolidate on identity because it preserves the choice of other cyber tools for customers. They're not locked into one endpoint tool or one network security tool. They can choose whatever is best for their business. And we'll keep them more secure, especially as the thread environment is rapidly evolving.
The ability to choose the best cyber tool and not be locked into a stack from one monolithic vendor is very powerful and it's resonating with our customers. They cut costs and standardize their identity workflows and use cases around Octa, and then choose everything else around the rest of cyber to best fit their needs.
All right, well, thank you so much for coming in today. Told that is Todd McKinnon, CEO of Octa