Okta's Oktane 2025 | Kerry Ok, Okta

Clips
More from Okta's Oktane 2025

Kerry Ok

EVP, Company Planning & Operations

Okta

play_circle_outline Discussion on AI's impact on organizational workflows and employee productivity.

play_circle_outline Emphasis on upskilling employees rather than reducing headcount due to AI implementation.

play_circle_outline Okta's careful approach to AI deployment, considering security and organizational readiness.

Info
Transcript

Kerry Ok, Okta

Kerry Ok

EVP, Company Planning & Operations Okta

Kerry Ok, executive vice president of company planning and operations of Okta, joins theCUBE host Rebecca Knight and analyst Jackie McGuire during Oktane to share how the company is aligning AI innovation with a security-first culture. She explains how Okta is investing in employees through company-wide training, AI learning days and prompt challenges while making change management central to its strategy. AI is shifting from simple copilots to redefining entire workflows, requiring clarity, transparency and balance with security, she emphasizes.

The... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

What is the current role of AI in transforming workflows at Okta, and what are the challenges associated with its implementation? add

What challenges are organizations facing in upskilling employees to effectively use AI tools? add

What is Okta's primary focus regarding its approach to AI tools and team development? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Kerry Ok, Okta

search

Rebecca Knight

>> Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's Live coverage of Okta Oktane. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, alongside my co-host and analyst, Jackie McGuire.

Jackie McGuire

>> Rebecca.

Rebecca Knight

>> Yes.

Jackie McGuire

>> It has been a great day.

Rebecca Knight

>> It has.

Jackie McGuire

>> You're doing a great job.

Rebecca Knight

>> Thank you, and we are about to have something that doesn't happen on theCUBE very often, an all-female panel. This is very good. I love women in tech. Kerry Ok, she's the EVP company planning and operations at Okta. Welcome, Kerry.

Kerry Ok

>> Thank you both for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Rebecca Knight

>> One of the things that you've talked about before is how AI is not just changing what companies build, but also how we all work, and how we all spend the majority of our time when we are doing the work that we're paid to do. From your perspective, what feels different in organizations today in terms of AI, and how it's changing this?

Kerry Ok

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think in the first few months of AI, earlier this year, it's only been a little bit of time.

Jackie McGuire

>> It feels like a hundred years.

Kerry Ok

>> I know, it feels like a couple years already. I think what it was was a lot of copilot work, which is like, "Okay, I have this buddy next to me that can help me be a little faster at writing emails or get me answers quicker." And that's helpful, but I think where it is right now, and I'm leading the people side, the business transformation side of AI at Okta, it's really redefining all of our workflows. I think that's what is game changing. Not just using AI to augment the work that you already do, the role that you already do, but really rethinking where the AI work stops and where your work starts. It's a big change management challenge and we're working through that at Okta, but that's where we're going to get the most value out of it.

Rebecca Knight

>> No, I love how you describe it as a change management challenge because that's exactly what it is, it's getting people comfortable. The promise of AI is that AI is going to take away the tedious stuff, the stuff we hate doing, the boring work, what is repetitive stress for our brains. Then, allow you to focus on the creative stuff, the innovative stuff. How would you describe what it takes to get employees on board with that, and maybe some challenges that you found, and opportunities too?

Kerry Ok

>> Yeah, and we're right in the middle of this at Okta. I will say three months from now, let's see how all of it is working out, but so far so good. I think a few things. Number one, at Okta we are really focused on using AI to accelerate growth and accelerate productivity rather than just looking at efficiency. I think communicating that with clarity to your teams is a really important step forward. Because I think when the words efficiency get thrown out and things like that, that's when people start to get really nervous. The second, we have a company-wide initiative right now, take Okta to the power of AI. In that, right now in our company-wide method, the central pillar is our people. Being very direct that this is an investment in all of our teams in our workplace. With that pillar, we're doing lots of things. We're doing boot camps for every single employee to be able to be proficient in their skills, and it's domain specific and skill specific. We're giving time back by doing AI days and those days are dedicated to AI learning and nothing else. Then, we're doing fun stuff too, like promptober contests and so forth. But I think the change management are being very clear from the beginning, we've told everyone, everyone's job is changing. We're not going to beat around the bush. Everyone's role is changing, but we're going to invest in your skills and your development.

Jackie McGuire

>> I think that's really important, because when you said efficiency I always joke like it's refficiency, right? Everybody's worried that efficiency is going to return into a reduction in force. I went back and forth with the CEO of LinkedIn a few weeks ago, because they were saying it's fundamentally changing it, and everybody keeps saying, "Oh, these tier one jobs are going away." I argue that, "No, they're not. They're just changing." The skills you'll be expected to have, the degree to which you understand AI and interacting with it is changing, but that's not a new headcount problem. That's a upskilling problem. That's a, how do you teach employees how to effectively use it so you don't have to replace them with people who know how or with agents. Really, have you found, I assume you monitor employee satisfaction, was that your intention when you set out, was we're going to be really clear and transparent? Or, did you figure that out along the way as people started to feel a lot easy?

Kerry Ok

>> Yeah, we did it from the start. However, I will say we had one advantage at Okta with our AI journey, is that we didn't rush into AI as quickly as a lot of organizations did. Now, the reason behind that is probably pretty obvious. Okta is a security company and our number one overall priority at Okta right now is our Okta Secure Identity Commitment. We were really thoughtful even in how we rolled out AI tools earlier this year, how we rolled things out. Because we took a pause and we weren't just rushing immediately to deploy everything, it gave us more thought on the change management side. We really talked to our teams, we asked what people were feeling. How they were feeling. That led us to making sure that we're going to invest our people. The other side of it too that I will just say is, we haven't been doing this for 10 years, so there's not this huge marketplace of people you can just recruit and bring in and have all this experience. Right now, I think it's far smarter for companies to invest and upskill their teams rather than look for greener grass. That's how we went about it.

Rebecca Knight

>> One thing we've heard a lot about today at Oktane is that Okta is drinking its own champagne and really trying to test all of its own products in-house, because what you learn internally feeds into smarter, more secure products. Can you give an example of something that you learned in-house that has in fact had a real change into the platform?

Kerry Ok

>> Yeah, absolutely. I will go back to the Okta Secure Identity Commitment, and I'll give you the tangible example. I think everyone here knows about what hit the news in early September around a breach that occurred with a very common chatbot that is out there, and it impacted hundreds and hundreds of organizations. One of the things that we were very fortunate about is because we use our own tools and because we put such strict rules in place with the Okta Secure Identity Commitment around any of our AI tools, we use that tool. I will just say that, but we were not impacted by that attack. Todd talked a little bit about that in the keynote. The reason is, is because we can do IP restrictions within our own technology. That made it known that even though they had taken those OAuth tokens, they could not get access because of the IP restrictions. That's an example of measuring twice before you jump into how you're using agents really helps. Unfortunately, I think that was a huge wake-up call for all of the SaaS industry around, you think of a chatbot as, oh, that's such low risk, that's such a simple AI use case, and yet we saw the results. That's a tangible example.

Jackie McGuire

>> Yeah. I personally had a horrible experience with a chatbot a week ago that resulted in my poor kid not having a cell phone for a few days because I reached out to customer service and was like, "Hey, their screen's broken. I'd like to get it fixed." They're like, "Great, we ordered a new replacement device for you." I'm like, "I didn't want to do that." I feel like, yeah, we had this conversation with Jack Hirsch yesterday and a couple other people of like, you guys had a security incident a few years ago, and the degree to which that caused you to fundamentally shift corporate culture, which is part of what prevented you from being impacted by this new issue is really admirable. I wish other companies would take a lesson from that, because to your point, I wasted six hours of my day trying to fix this issue because so few of the employees at this cell phone company understood what the agent had done, how it had done it, why it had done it, or how to undo it, and that's terrifying. It's terrifying from a chatbot that I literally just couldn't get in touch with my kid for six hours because they accidentally deactivated her cell phone.

Kerry Ok

>> Oh, my God.

Jackie McGuire

>> Yeah. It was that bad and it was quite eye-opening, to your point of the extent to which a chatbot can really cause chaos in one's life.

Kerry Ok

>> Yeah, and I think right now I am in this role, there's so much pressure to move fast with AI. There's so much pressure from boards, from CEOs. Everyone feels like they have to be going at this exponential speed, but we need to take a pause and a moment and know that the scale you get with AI is incredible, but it also multiplies your attack surface at the same scale and we got to balance this out.

Jackie McGuire

>> You also have to, I think, wait to see what the economy can bear. I think we've been so used to this artificially cheap cloud computing for so long that it's like, throw everything in the cloud, use agents for everything. We've seen a number of different technologies, cloud security, all these different things where we were like, "Oh, yes, this could be used to do everything, but the ROI is actually here." I think the market is still very much in the process of defining that. I guess with that question, how do you think about balancing not over-investing in these things or making your employees so reliant that if an API goes down they just can't do their jobs?

Kerry Ok

>> Yeah, I think with AI we have to, again, measure twice and then take the action. I think you can really quickly get so dependent upon this, and so a few things, a few parameters are in place. I think you have to do an extensive testing. We are jumping over user acceptance testing so quickly, we're jumping through phases because of this fear with AI. I think really making sure that we have great testing policies. Second, you have to have a backup plan and to know. Then, of course, I have to do a little bit of the Okta pitch. I think you have to make sure that you secure those agents, so that going down is one thing, but also going rogue is another thing. I even find that far scarier, so that's what we're trying to do. Again, the phases at Okta, right now, we're really in this phase of we're going to enable all of our team, we're going to get their skills up, they're going to get deep training, but also we're not doing that in a matter of six weeks. We're doing that over the matter of six months, and I think that helps.

Rebecca Knight

>> When you are presenting this vision to your employees too, how does it work and how do you paint this picture of a future in which humans are collaborating side by side with these agents? Which is already happening to some degree, but how do you help your workers think about preparing for that reality and your leaders too, who will be managing not only humans but also a lot of agents?

Kerry Ok

>> I think when you're preparing your workforce for AI, here's a few things that we've done and it seems to be working well. First, I think you have to be really straightforward and honest with them about the vision you have at your company. Right now, I'm seeing a lot of where companies are sitting on the fence of like, "Well, we don't want to impact jobs, but we want to use AI." They're being fickle or wishy-washy. We just were very direct in saying, "This is the future. We think this is the biggest shift since the internet, and we are absolutely all in. However, here is where it's going to work at our company and where it's not going to work." I think the second thing is being, again, I said being very clear on what the goal is, and it isn't. We have this whole sheet of AI like, this is what it is and this is what it isn't. It's around growth and all of that, not around efficiency. Then, also, where does it fit in the stack ranking. What we made very clear is that it does not take priority over security. Security is number one, and making sure that everyone knows the rules. Then, the last is being very clear about the fact that, but when you embrace this and you create new workflows, new roles, new things, they're celebrated and rewarded, and we have a lot of that woven throughout. That's the approach that we are taking, of just being really clear and respectful with our teams.

Jackie McGuire

>> What does success look like a year from now?

Kerry Ok

>> Yeah, so success a year from now, number one, in a broader sense beyond just Okta it would be that AI is actually being used and not stopped because of too many attacks happening from AI. Truly, Todd talked about this in our morning keynote today. There is a chance that we go back 10 years in security with AI because everyone is just going so fast and furious, and we've made so much headway. That cannot happen. We also don't want to lose the opportunity of AI because we don't secure it properly. I would say first things first is that we are using open standards like cross app access and identity security fabrics to make sure we are doing AI responsibly. The second thing, at Okta, I want to make sure we are doing AI responsibly and ethically so that we're doing this to drive innovation and growth. We are doing this sustainably and that we are making the right decisions with AI. Then, third, zooming down into Okta. I want to see that we are going faster, we are going farther, and people are feeling very fulfilled in the work they're doing because we've automated away the boring repetitive tasks. I would love to see that in a year's time.

Rebecca Knight

>> Okay, so final question. If you're advising a CIO or a COO who's trying to figure out how to adopt AI safely in their organization, what's the first step you'd recommend?

Kerry Ok

>> The first step is that, and whether this is happening with your CEO or whether this is happening with your board, I would advise the CIO to have a really direct conversation about the pace that you'll go at with AI and how you will balance that with security to make sure you are innovating and securing your company in the right balance. That's the most important conversation to start off with.

Rebecca Knight

>> Mic drop. I love it. Kerry, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, a really interesting conversation.

Kerry Ok

>> Thank you both. This was great.

Rebecca Knight

>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jackie McGuire. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Okta Oktane. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in enterprise tech news and analysis.