Decoder with Nilay Patel Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity
131 snips
Mar 30, 2026 
Todd McKinnon, Okta co-founder and CEO, runs a company behind workplace logins and security. He gets into why AI has SaaS on edge, and why machine identities could become a huge new battleground. They also dig into runaway agent risks, kill switches, borrowed permissions, interoperability fights, and whether digital IDs could help separate humans from bots.
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Customers Forced Okta To Lead With Agents
- Okta's pivot toward agent identity came from customer meetings, not a single internal brainstorm.
- McKinnon says executives kept stopping him when he mentioned agents, and after dozens of meetings he flipped the pitch so agents came first and the old story often disappeared.
Agentic Coding Changes The Job More Than It Removes It
- McKinnon believes AI coding changes software engineering without eliminating engineers because far more software will get built.
- He says the hard work shifts to scaling, maintaining, and understanding agent-built systems over years, which no one has yet done at real maturity.
Entry Level Developers Still Matter In An AI Era
- McKinnon rejects the idea that AI wipes out junior developers and says education will adapt rather than disappear.
- He expects schools to keep teaching computer science, but with more focus on coordinating agents and architecting systems while newcomers adopt the tools fastest.