Okta's COO: Companies Are Avoiding the Real AI Work Problem

Okta's President and COO has AI agents sitting in on business reviews. He named them Leo, Sloan, Hank, and Walker, and they're genuinely part of the team now. He's even booked flights to Bangalore to work alongside humans there. So yeah, he's living the AI integration thing. But here's the uncomfortable truth he's trying to tell everyone: companies are throwing money at AI tools while completely missing what actually matters—the part where you have to tear apart your entire workflow and rebuild it around these new capabilities.

What does the average organization do when they deploy AI? They bolt it onto their existing processes like a turbocharger on a car that was never meant to go that fast. Nobody wants to admit this because restructuring how people work is messy, political, and way harder than signing a contract with an AI vendor. But Okta's leadership is saying you can't skip this step. The agents on their team only work because they rewired how decisions actually get made. You can't just drop new tools into old systems and expect transformation.

The real challenge isn't whether AI can do the work. It's whether your organization will actually change how it operates. That's the part executives are in denial about. That's also the part that determines whether your AI investment becomes a competitive advantage or just an expensive experiment.