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I’m the President of Product & Technology at Okta, leading global product, engineering…
Articles by Ric
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Reflections on Product Engineering Management
Reflections on Product Engineering Management
I am often asked by current or aspiring engineering managers (EM): "What do you look for in an engineering leader?" or…
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Hiring Frontend Engineers: Are you a future Medallian?
Hiring Frontend Engineers: Are you a future Medallian?
Private Message (PM) if you think you’ve got the mindset to be a Medallian. You can also apply here.
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Hiring - Oracle Marketing Cloud Data Engineering
Hiring - Oracle Marketing Cloud Data Engineering
Oracle Marketing Cloud Data Engineering I am looking for some rockstars to help build an engineering organization from…
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Ric Smith shared thisThe same access that makes agents powerful also makes them dangerous. But as Derek du Preez and I were discussing at Oktane, “Right now, our dominant role is the gatekeeper.” With AI agents operating across data, models, applications, networks, and infrastructure, organizations face growing risks. Mitigating these security challenges demands an industry-wide effort. That’s why Okta and industry leaders formed the Blueprint Alliance: to help organizations operate their agentic stack as a unified, governed system. And together, we're creating a concrete way for you to address four critical questions: Where are my agents? What can they do? What are they doing? How do I respond? Thanks, Derek, for the conversation and for digging into where we’re headed. https://lnkd.in/gGF9dQ9h‘The gatekeeper’ - Okta expands AI agent controls, with ambitions beyond security?‘The gatekeeper’ - Okta expands AI agent controls, with ambitions beyond security?
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Ric Smith shared thisQ2 results are in. Our strongest quarter on record, outside of Q4. 🚀 What stands out most is how fast our product portfolio is translating into results. New products drove roughly 30% of Q2 bookings. We're turning the AI opportunity we outlined earlier this year into action. The customer conversation has moved from why agents need identity to how we secure them in production. We expanded Okta for AI Agents with Agent Gateway, Agent-to-Agent Connections, and Resource Access Certifications, moving governance from discovery into continuous, runtime control. Okta for AI Agents gained real momentum this quarter, from helping a Fortune 50 healthcare company meet HIPAA requirements to giving one of the world's largest asset managers least-privilege control over a fast-growing agent footprint. We also closed our acquisition of Permiso Security by Okta, which adds real-time visibility into agent behavior. Pair that with our growing Cross App Access ecosystem, now 25+ integrations deep with partners like Anthropic, Asana, and Atlassian, and customers have one place to discover, connect, and govern every agent in their enterprise, on any platform they choose. Kudos to this team for the pace of innovation. More to come at Oktane in September. https://bit.ly/4gkGax0 #OktaSecuresAI
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Ric Smith shared thisEnterprise access was built around users and applications. AI agents change that, yet only 34% of organizations apply the same identity controls to agents, leaving most without centralized visibility or audit trails. Agent SSO is now generally available to close that gap, bringing the open Cross App Access (XAA) standard into the identity product used by more than 20,000 Okta customers. Powered by XAA, Agent SSO registers every connected agent as a first-class identity in Okta's Universal Directory, right alongside human employees. This enables governance at scale by replacing static API keys with short-lived, least-privilege tokens while maintaining complete visibility, audit trails for compliance, and the ability to revoke access instantly. Agent SSO establishes the identity foundation by identifying agents and controlling their access. Okta for AI Agents completes the picture by discovering unmanaged agents, governing their lifecycle, and enforcing runtime controls. This delivers the continuous oversight required to secure the agentic enterprise. Read more here: https://bit.ly/4gbpTub. #OktaSecuresAI
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Ric Smith posted thisToday, Okta announced a definitive agreement to acquire Permiso Security, bringing together identity context, behavioral analytics, and threat intelligence to help customers detect and respond to identity threats in real time. Permiso brings more than 2,500 research-driven risk signals and advanced threat detections to help identify excessive permissions, unusual agent and tool usage, policy violations, and high-blast-radius activity across human, non-human, and agentic identities. Together, we’ll help security teams connect identity with runtime behavior, strengthening threat detection, posture management, and response across the enterprise. Permiso’s technology will also help identify supply chain threats in AI agent skills and prompts before they reach customer environments. The combination of identity context, runtime intelligence, and threat research will give customers a stronger foundation for securing AI-driven environments. Jason Martin and Paul Nguyen, thank you for placing your trust in us and for joining us on your next adventure. Read the full announcement here: https://bit.ly/45ySR0E
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Ric Smith shared thisWhen employees deploy AI agents, they create a web of background connections invisible to IT. Okta is surfacing these blind spots by expanding our Cross App Access (XAA) ecosystem to firmly place agent-to-app and app-to-app connections within the centralized identity perimeter. This expansion is anchored by our latest integrations with 25+ early XAA adopters, including Asana, Atlassian, Cloudflare, Cursor, Datadog, Figma, Slack, Zoom, and several other industry-critical applications. Built as an extension of OAuth and recognized as an official authorization extension of the MCP, XAA provides a standardized way to govern how AI agents connect to enterprise data. We’re already seeing this in action with Anthropic’s beta program last week, which enabled joint customers to begin leveraging Okta to help govern their use of Claude and its access to applications from participating partners that support XAA. By anchoring these workflows in Okta's identity engine, we are delivering central governance, removing standing privileges, and helping eliminate user consent fatigue. Excited to see this come to life. Together, we’re driving broader industry adoption and advancing the blueprint for the secure agentic enterprise. Check out the full announcement here: https://bit.ly/4guQQcI
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Ric Smith shared thisWe're thrilled to join OpenAI's Daybreak Cyber Partner Program. As we leverage their frontier cyber capabilities into our product development lifecycle, our engineering teams can shift from patch management to autonomous, sandboxed code hardening, shrinking vulnerability windows before code reaches production. This strengthens platform resilience for our customers and helps ensure that Okta remains secure-by-design. With attackers increasingly leveraging AI to find vulnerabilities, we're also using GPT-5.5 with Trusted Access for Cyber to harden our own infrastructure, supporting specialized cybersecurity workflows that help us move faster as defenders. The larger point is that as these models and agents become more powerful, identity and authorization become more critical. Organizations will need a vendor-neutral identity to help answer the foundational questions: where are my agents, what can they connect to, and what can they do. That's how we build secure agentic enterprises. Thanks to the OpenAI team for this partnership. Excited to build the future of cyber defense together.Ric Smith shared thisWe’re expanding OpenAI Daybreak to help democratize patching vulnerable software at machine speed: - Codex Security plugin: find, validate, and fix vulnerabilities right inside Codex - The full version of GPT-5.5-Cyber model: a strong model for trusted defenders - Cyber Partner Program: powering products built on top of our best cyber capabilities for 20+ leading security companies to secure the world's software - Patch the Planet: working with maintainers to secure critical open source projects With an update to GPT‑5.5‑Cyber, it’s now more permissive and more capable for advanced, authorized cybersecurity work. It is our most capable cyber model yet, with stronger performance on defensive workflows like tracing vulnerable code, validating issues, developing patches, and preparing evidence for human review. Codex Security brings these capabilities into real security workflows. Teams can run deep scans, validate findings, trace attack paths, build threat models, generate codebase-specific patches for review, and export into the tools they already use. We’re also launching the OpenAI Daybreak Cyber Partner Program with leading security software and services providers. Participating partners can use GPT‑5.5 with Trusted Access for Cyber in the security products and services they provide to customers. This helps their customers benefit from advanced defensive AI, while keeping direct model access with trusted partners. Our goal is to move beyond using models to find more vulnerabilities, towards a world of safer software and cyber resilience. https://lnkd.in/eTjgMDUw
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Ric Smith shared thisStrong Q1. Our newer products are driving meaningful momentum, with solid contributions across our portfolio. We're also seeing great strength in our ecosystem, as partner-sourced bookings accounted for multiple large-scale deals this quarter. Since Okta for AI Agents was made generally available at the end of April, we've moved fast. We’ve already extended the solution to support new agent platforms, work with any identity provider for human identities, and govern access to any resource type. As a truly vendor-neutral platform, we’re committed to partnering across the industry to build a new ecosystem for the agentic era. From our work with Google Cloud, AWS, and ServiceNow to Anthropic and OpenAI, we acknowledge that no single company can address AI security alone. Through some of our recent integrations, organizations can secure the full lifecycle of agents built on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and gain deep visibility into identity risks within Claude environments. We’re giving customers the freedom to choose whatever technology best serves their business, while delivering the security foundation they need to lead. Read more here: https://bit.ly/4dHlApj #OktaSecuresAI
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Ric Smith shared thisAI agents are becoming production-grade integrations, and the old shortcuts are starting to show their limits. Manually hardcoded API keys and custom authorization logic don’t scale or help productivity…and they don’t give teams the visibility or control they need when agents start taking action. The next set of Auth0 for AI Agents innovations is here to help developers ship agentic apps safely at scale. What customers can now do: ✅ Deliver the missing identity layer for agents: With Agent as Principal, every agent can be assigned its own first-class identity so actions can be permissioned, traced, and revoked on its own terms. ✅ Secure agent-to-tool connections: As the first enterprise-grade identity platform to authenticate and authorize MCP clients, Auth for MCP ensures every agent operation on behalf of a verified user is scoped to the exact tools and APIs it needs. On-Behalf-Of Token Exchange is also available to help eliminate shared secrets and overpowered service accounts. ✅ Scale authorization and isolation: FGA Permissions Index enables high-performance permission checks so applications can filter large datasets, while Token Vault with Organizations Support helps multi-tenant SaaS teams isolate third-party credentials by customer. Proud of the Auth0 team for continuing to push this forward, and grateful to the developers and customers helping shape what trusted agentic apps require. Learn more here: https://bit.ly/3RyIJ4o
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Ric Smith shared thisOrganizations are deploying Claude at scale without the same level of visibility they have for other enterprise tools. As one of the select launch partners, Okta is now integrating Identity Security Posture Management with Anthropic's new Claude Compliance API. The AI revolution is moving fast, and your security needs to keep up! We are thrilled to announce that Okta is an official launch partner for Anthropic’s brand-new Claude Compliance API! We’re helping security teams lock down identities interacting with Claude by surfacing and remediating risks such as unrotated admin keys, offboarding gaps, and dormant accounts. By contextualizing Claude's activity with identity signals from across the enterprise, Okta helps ensure AI environments aren’t managed in a silo. This same identity-first approach extends to the agents organizations are building and deploying with products like Claude. Through Okta for AI Agents, agents receive first-class identities and are secured throughout their entire lifecycle, enabling companies to continue deploying AI at scale. Read more here: https://bit.ly/4fyAcIG #OktaSecuresAI
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Congrats Chirantan "CJ" Desai!
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Ric Smith reacted on thisThanks for joining us David Soria ParraRic Smith reacted on thisTodd McKinnon invited me on stage at his Oktane keynote last week to talk about MCP, identity, and why open standards matter for agents. Enterprises have always run on common standards. They give customers choice and let all of us build infrastructure and products on a shared foundation. That's why we open-sourced MCP almost two years ago. Adoption has gone further than we expected: ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, VS Code, Cursor, Claude. Tens of thousands of public servers. AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and Cloudflare all run it in production. That only happens with an open standard. Many of these standards are created at the intersection of companies. Enterprise Managed Authorization, which came out of the Okta and Anthropic partnership, is another example. As we move towards an increasingly agentic future, we need to keep working together across companies, across labs, and as individuals to build standards we can all rely on. Thank you to the team at Okta (Allison Johnson, Aaron Parecki, Steven Tamm and everyone else) for having me and giving me the opportunity to share my perspective.
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Ric Smith reacted on thisRic Smith reacted on thisLast week, I joined @Nina Trentmann, Carol Massar, and Tim Stenovec on @Bloomberg to discuss how CFOs are turning AI's promise into real business value. For me, it comes down to a few questions. Are we clear on the problem AI is meant to solve? Is it working from data we trust, and does it understand the context? And can we stand behind the results? In finance, an AI answer you can't trace is an answer you can't use. I believe CFOs are well placed to bring this level of discipline and intention to the next phase of AI adoption. Watch the interview here: https://lnkd.in/gaYSaqKqWatch Workiva CFO on Labor Cost Impacts of AI Implementation - BloombergWatch Workiva CFO on Labor Cost Impacts of AI Implementation - Bloomberg
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Ric Smith liked thisVery much looking forward to hosting this panel. Hope you can join us!Ric Smith liked thisAI is rewriting both the attack surface and the defense playbook. Eric Fourrier (GitGuardian), Ron Dovich (Brinqa), Vyas Sekar (Carnegie Mellon University), and Mark Bower (Anjuna Security) cut through the noise on what's real, what's hype, and what you should actually be doing to keep your business and customers safe — moderated by Gregor Stewart (SentinelOne). RSVP before it's too late: https://lnkd.in/eTdpYRM4
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Ric Smith reacted on thisRic Smith reacted on thisIt's hard to believe it’s been 11.5 years of working alongside Todd McKinnon. Looking at this photo from Oktane in Las Vegas, I'm reminded of the countless challenges we’ve navigated, the milestones we’ve celebrated, and the immense growth we’ve experienced together along the way. Having a front-row seat to his leadership and vision has been one of the greatest privileges of my career. A professional partnership of this length is rare, and it’s built on shared goals, deep trust, and a relentless drive to push boundaries. While Oktane is always a highlight, it’s the day-to-day collaboration, the mentorship, and the shared history that truly make this journey so special. Here’s to the last 11.5 years of teamwork, and to whatever incredible chapters come next! 🥂 #OktasecuresAI #Partnership #Okta #Oktane #Leadership #Teamwork
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Ric Smith reacted on thisRic Smith reacted on thisStarting today I will be joining Cognition as CISO. I have dedicated my professional life to trying to make technology safer and more trustworthy, and the next 3-5 years will clearly be the most important period in the history of the security industry. Devin is already the best way to build Enterprise-grade code. I can’t think of a better place to make an impact on the ability of every company, not just the best resourced, to protect themselves, than at Cognition. Here are my thoughts on why security is the real AI safety risk we should be focused on, and how we should approach solving it with measured professionalism.
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Ric Smith reacted on thisRic Smith reacted on thisI am very excited to share that I’m joining Meta as Chief Enterprise Platform Officer to lead Meta’s enterprise efforts reporting to Mark Zuckerberg. This newly formed unit will focus on translating Meta’s AI leadership into transformative products for developers and businesses. The first wave of AI tremendously changed what individuals could accomplish. Over the next few years, businesses of every size will rebuild how they innovate, sell, and serve customers, and run day to day efficiently using AI. Businesses will be able to reinvent entire workflows: from product development and customer engagement to decision-making and, ultimately, scale Meta has a rare advantage in this transition: advanced AI models, large-scale infrastructure, and agents paired with an ecosystem that already helps millions of advertisers and hundreds of millions of businesses grow and succeed. Bringing those strengths together creates the opportunity to build an entirely new enterprise platform. I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to lead this effort and excited for everything we’ll build with our customers. I want to thank the incredibly talented people I had the privilege of working with at MongoDB. Getting to build the leading modern data platform for the multi-cloud AI era alongside such an exceptional group of people was truly special. It was an absolute honor serving a growing community of MongoDB customers.
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Ric Smith liked thisRic Smith liked thisAt #Oktane26, a big theme emerged: In the age of AI agents, organisations face real confusion about how to move forward safely. The trade-off feels inevitable—lock agents down and lose their value, or let them run free and accept the risk. Until now. This week, #Okta announced a series of innovations—like endpoint detection, Agent SSO, and Auth for UCP—that give enterprises the visibility and control to deploy agents safely and at scale. But more importantly, we recognize this is bigger than one vendor. We’ve joined forces with industry leaders to form the Blueprint Alliance and co-author an open, multi-vendor reference architecture that answers the four key questions for securing and governing agents at enterprise scale. Watching our ecosystem of partners and customers rally around this mission was the highlight of the week. A massive thank you to the Okta team for pulling off an incredible event and for stepping up to meet this moment. This is our chance to give customers the clarity and confidence they need to secure AI and lead their industries forward. If you are trying to unblock your organisation's AI roadmap safely, start here: https://lnkd.in/gATWG9Bm
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Joe Mayberry
Great insights from Cody Warhurst, Director of Identity and Access Management at Keurig Dr Pepper, who joined SailPoint at Navigate to discuss the fundamentals of identity security. Cody highlights the critical importance of lifecycle management—onboarding, offboarding, and change management—as the foundation for a successful identity security program. When done right, it helps ensure employees have the access they need from day one, boosting productivity and eliminating delays. Check out his full interview:
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