Partner POV | Okta for AI Agents

This article was written and contributed by, Okta.

Securely manage your AI agents from a single control plane

AI agents are reshaping the enterprise like the cloud and SaaS did — only faster, far less predictably, and without the identity infrastructure to support them.

As agents spread across the enterprise, they're acting on behalf of your users, connecting to your most sensitive systems, and making decisions autonomously. They are often invisible to security and IT teams, have little to no clear owner, managed identity, access controls, and audit trail.

88% of organizations report confirmed or suspected AI agent security incidents. Only 22% have identities tied to their agents.

To help securely manage AI agents at scale, enterprises must answer four key questions:

1. Where are my agents?
2. What can they do?
3. What are they doing?
4. How do I respond?

If you can't answer all four today, your agentic security posture has a blind spot.

Take control of AI agents before they cause a breach

Okta for AI Agents gives your AI agents managed, first-class identities so you can discover, onboard, protect, and govern them from a single control plane. No matter where your agents run, across frameworks, clouds, or SaaS environments, you can discover them, import them from platforms they run on, scope their access to least privilege, enforce runtime controls, review access, and respond fast when something goes wrong.

Where are my agents?
Discover and onboard your AI agents

Before you can help secure AI agents, you need to find them. Okta brings known and unknown agents into view across your environment.

• Manage the identities of homegrown agents: AI agent registry allows you to register custom-built agents in Universal Directory as first-class identities. Get a single, searchable source of truth to assign human ownership, reduce blind spots, and extend your existing identity controls to your agents.
• Import agents from external sources: AI agent import enables you to import agents from leading platforms, including Salesforce Agentforce, Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, and ServiceNow AI Platform. With prebuilt integrations, organizations can reduce manual effort and bring agents under governance faster.
• Shadow AI agent discovery: The Okta browser plugin detects shadow AI agents by identifying OAuth consent grants in managed Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers. An integration with CrowdStrike Falcon EDR extends discovery to the endpoint, surfacing coding agents (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor) running on managed devices and mapping what each one can reach. These unmanaged agents are added to a centralized dashboard with enriched user context, tying every agent back to the named owners, based on policy, with a full audit trail, so teams can see what agents exist, where they run, and who connected them.

What can they do?
Govern AI agents across their lifecycle

Once you know where your agents are, you need to map everything they can reach and enforce policies on those connections. Instead of hardcoded credentials and standing access, agents get scoped, short-lived tokens – only for what they need for as long as they need it. That extends across the key resource connection types organizations rely on today:

• Authorization servers: Issue tokens with tightly defined scopes so agents receive only the API permissions required for a specific task, limiting overprivileged access.
• Secrets: Grant agents access to vaulted secrets on demand rather than embedding credentials in code, reducing secret sprawl and exposure risk.
• Service accounts: Govern service account access through a managed system, bringing control, visibility, and accountability to how agents use privileged machine identities.
• Applications: Control how agents connect to SaaS apps through managed consent flows, so humans can approve access, handle tokens more securely, and maintain a clear record of authorized applications.
• MCP servers: Treat MCP servers as governed resources so you can better secure and manage how agents connect to the tools and services exposed through them.
• Other agents: Agents can securely call other agents, not just apps and resources, under admin-approved policy – with each handoff captured in a single audit trail.

Once agent access is in place, you need to review and certify that access over time, and revoke it when needed.

• Request access to AI agents: Automated user access requests for AI agents replaces ad hoc approvals with a structured governance workflow. Users request access from their dashboard; admins manage approvals, automate actions, and enforce time-bound permissions.
• Certify user access to AI agents: Bring AI agents into the same certification workflows used for other enterprise resources. Approve or revoke user-level access on a regular cadence, with full auditability and policy enforcement.
• Certify resource access for AI agents: Certify agent connections, revoke what it no longer needs access to, and produce the audit trail compliance requires. Right-sizing agent access reduces stale connections agents no longer need, reducing risk exposure, while reducing costs.
• Together, these capabilities enforce least privilege for AI agents in real time, without slowing down adoption.

What are they doing?
Enforce identity, policy, and audit on every tool call

Even with access scoped correctly, you need visibility into what agents actually do at runtime. 

• Agent Gateway is a single Okta-secured endpoint that any AI agent can call through to reach enterprise tools, regardless of which vendor built the agent or which tool it needs to reach. Okta is the identity provider in the path: it verifies the agent, controls which tools it can use, holds credentials so the agent doesn't reach them, and logs every call against a managed identity.

How do I respond?
Act fast when an agent behaves unexpectedly

Detecting a problem is only useful if you can act on it. Okta for AI Agents gives security teams the tools to respond quickly and contain risk when an agent behaves unexpectedly.

• Deactivate rogue agents: Manual agent deactivation gives you an rapid kill switch to prevent new token requests and future authorizations when an agent behaves unexpectedly.
• Capture audit logs & telemetry: Get access to a comprehensive record of agent activity, including tool calls, access attempts, and authorization decisions. Stream telemetry to your SIEM to monitor behavior, support audits, and accelerate incident response.

Why Okta

As AI agents become a core part of your enterprise, they introduce new identity, access, and governance challenges that traditional approaches were not built to address. Okta provides the foundation to discover, onboard, govern, and protect AI agents across your environments, providing visibility into where agents exist, control over what they can do, what they are actually doing, and how to respond when something goes wrong. This is how Okta secures AI.