Partners key to closing identity security gaps as AI adoption accelerates, Okta believes

Partners see the huge opportunity in being able to build a very large business with Okta around designing agents, building agents, consultation design to customers, implementing these solutions and then managing their identity, says Laura Padilla, SVP, Global Partner & Alliances, Okta.

According to Okta’s Business at Work 2026 report, organizations in the Asia Pacific region still lack identity controls as they accelerate their AI journey. With non-human identities like AI agents, bots and service accounts outnumbering human users by as much as 45 to 1, the report revealed that only around 10% of organizations have identity systems fully equipped to manage and secure these identities.

According to Dan Mountstephen, SVP and General Manager, APJ at Okta, there is a fundamental shift in how identity needs to operate.

"We are seeing this play out very clearly across APAC, where organizations are moving quickly to adopt AI, but are still building the governance models needed to support it. This isn’t just about managing more users; it’s about managing entirely new classes of identity that don’t behave like humans and operate at a completely different scale,” he stated.

Mountstephen believes that identity is becoming the control plane for the modern enterprise, as it’s what enables organizations to manage access, enforce policy and maintain trust as environments become more complex.

Managing non-human identities

This is also where Okta believes its partner ecosystem can help organizations understand and manage their identities better. Laura Padilla SVP, Global Partner & Alliances, Okta shared that every region is at a different pace in their AI journey. However, as the number of non-human identities increases, there is a strong need for a complete platform.

“So if you think about us moving from foundational pieces of MFA, SSO and then lifecycle management and governance and then PAM and then finally SIEM as well with Auth0 and if a customer is looking for a neutral platform that they want to be able to touch all those different pieces, you don't really have another product besides Okta. We have a complete platform,” Padilla said in an interview with CRN Asia.

Padilla added that customers and partners want to be able to have one central control plane, which the Okta platform enables. Customers can manage all their different identities on one single control plane.

“The biggest challenge is visibility for customers. AI democratizes software. I could go and build myself an agent, right? And so, it allows almost anyone to be more empowered to do that, which is a good thing. But the bad thing about it is, what are all these agents doing? Where are they deployed, right? And so, with that, it's very hard to control. Even internally within their own customer environment, the engineering team may be building agents and not telling the IT teams that they're building the agents. They deploy them, and the IT teams maybe don't even know what's happening in their own environments. And identity is really at the center of all that. If you know who is within your network, you can secure it,” she explained.

Partners leading the change

Interestingly, with the awareness of identity security increasing in the industry, Padilla shared that partners are also now looking to go in house and use Okta’s products to start familiarizing themselves with it so they can build a practice around it.

“Companies are building agents to become more efficient internally, get more productivity out of their workers. So first and foremost, that's happening. And so, the Okta solution, our partners are just thinking about using us as a customer as well, because they're also building these agents for those reasons. At the same time, they see the huge opportunity in being able to build a very large business with Okta around designing agents, building agents, consultation design to customers, implementing these solutions and then managing them,” she said.

For Padilla, it’s a completely different world when it comes to non-human identities.

“The way you control that is very different. Endpoint security isn't enough anymore. You need to actually be able to do it at the network layer as well as the authentication layer. And so, we've learned to do that because we've had deep experience in this area now for so many years,” Padilla added.

Partners are also saying they want to learn how to do it because they want to secure their own agents. Padilla also shared that Okta’s larger GSI partners are looking to build consultation practices around it.

“Partners and customers have known us as an identity vendor on the human side. But if you add in the non-human opportunity, it's massive. Agentic AI has a US$267 billion global partner opportunity. And there's no better partner to do it with than Okta. So, if you want to capitalize on AI and do it as a builder, or if you're a services partner, I mean, Okta is really the platform to do that with,” she concluded.