Okta to help developers integrate identity management into AI customer agents

October 17, 2024

Okta is adding new tools to help companies manage and secure their AI-based agents.

The company chose its annual Oktane partner conference to introduce a series of new features to its Customer Identity Cloud (CIC) aimed at helping developers integrate identity management into their AI customer agents.

The new GenAI features will target the generative AI models that developers use when crafting the automated support agents. The features are designed to integrate with several generative AI frameworks that are popular with developers.

Speaking at the conference, CIC President Shiv Ramji said that identity management is essential as generative AI in general and AI agents in particular are exploding in popularity.

“In just a few years generative AI has transformed from an experimental technology to one that everyone wants to integrate,” said Ramji. "We are in for a few years of exponential growth.”

Find all of our coverage from Oktane 2024 here.

Okta is targeting four areas in particular that the company believes will be essential for the management of AI agents:

User authentication: Ramji noted that if users cannot easily be authenticated then AI bots will be largely rendered useless, The integration with frameworks will aim to minimize the hassle associated with authentication.

API integration: With the ability for the API agent to call up third party APIs on the user’s behalf, the agent becomes far more effective. This integration could include popular services such as Box, GitHub, or Google calendar.

Asynchronous authorization: In this case, the Agent and the user would work in different time frames. One example would be the purchase of tickets to a sporting event. The agent would have permission to seek out specific ticket prices on the user’s behalf using their information, but the decision on whether to make the purchase would be down to the human.

Retrieval Augmented Generation: In this case, a user may only have certain permissions to access the data being crawled by the agent. Okta said that in such cases, fine grained authentication will be needed to ensure that agnts are only seeing the appropriate content while still getting the most accurate results.

SC Media has a full team on the ground to cover all of the latest news coming out of Oktane 2024. An collection of coverage from the show floor can be found here.