Identity vendors reach for the agent layer

Forrester analysts Andras Cser and Geoff Cairns have published their assessment of Okta's annual conference, where the vendor positioned its platform as a control plane for AI agents. The announcements centred on agent identity, runtime authorisation and agent-to-agent interaction, with chief executive Todd McKinnon arguing that no single vendor can govern the agent ecosystem alone.

That argument took the form of the Blueprint Alliance, a multi-vendor architecture for identity and access management for agents, covering governance, identity management, authorisation and interoperability. Forrester's reading is that the strategy's success depends less on Okta's own roadmap than on whether the identity security industry converges on common standards for agent identity, trust propagation, authorisation and accountability.

Some of that work is already visible. Okta has been developing the Cross App Access extension and enterprise-managed access specifications with Anthropic and others, now part of the MCP authorisation extensions, which are based on OAuth 2.1 but have not been issued by a standards body.

What the analysts say is missing

The critical half of the note is specific. SPIFFE has become the de facto standard for non-human identities, and Okta does not yet have a full SPIFFE agent identity implementation, with support on the roadmap for the fourth quarter of 2026. No plans for any universal know-your-agent framework have been disclosed. Because the workforce and customer identity stacks have different session and agent management capabilities, running both raises costs on each side. And pricing is unresolved, with the analysts expecting transaction-based rather than per-user pricing.

The opportunity they name is the part nobody has standardised: intent discovery and authorisation decisions for agents, where no mature approach exists yet. That is the question underneath all agent identity work, and it is the reason a coalition was announced rather than a product.