At Okta, innovation isn’t siloed—it’s democratized. We believe the next game-changing idea can come from anyone, anywhere in the company, regardless of their role.
This belief kicked off our AI journey with one bold move: Giving every Okta employee access to OpenAI. What started as an experiment in curiosity has now become a core pillar of our innovation engine.
Moving beyond the whiteboard: Breaking the code barrier
For the longest time, tech innovation came with a strict entry fee: You had to know how to code.
If you couldn’t write the syntax, your idea usually stayed on the whiteboard. And if you could write the code, but struggled to tell the story? Your architecture probably didn't get the funding or support it deserved.
But as AI capabilities accelerate, we are seeing those barriers crumble. AI has become the bridge connecting great ideas to impactful outcomes. It is fundamentally changing who gets to innovate and how we communicate those innovations.
We decided early on to provide access to AI tools—not just to engineering teams, but to everyone. Starting in April 2023, we granted every hackathon participant access to OpenAI GPT-3, regardless of their role. With every subsequent hackathon, we introduced more emerging technologies and more training, ensuring access remained open to everyone, company-wide.
From that first experiment, the goal has always been the same: To ensure our culture of innovation is inclusive of everyone, in every role.
The two-way street of AI empowerment
At Okta, we are witnessing a massive leveling up of our workforce, and it’s happening in two distinct, equally powerful directions.
Empowering to influence
For those who may be less technical, the barrier to entry for prototyping is vanishing. We are seeing team members use AI to build apps, create prototypes, and draft technical documentation that makes a clear case to our engineering teams, creating a seamless transition from idea to reality.
A perfect example of this comes from our own marketing team. They identified a bottleneck in how regional events were managed, a process ripe for improvement but heavy on logistics. Instead of writing a requirements document and waiting for engineering resources, they leveraged our internal AI tools to build "LaunchPad: Events Copilot."
They applied their deep understanding of the process of planning and managing an event—the requirements, friction points, and opportunities—and used AI to translate that into a seamless, end-to-end tool. Now, they have a "one intake → on-brand execution" system that saves dozens of hours per event. They didn't just ask for a tool; they built it.
Empowering to lead
On the flip side, AI is the partner that helps technical experts become compelling storytellers.
I see myself in this evolution. I am a hardware engineer by training. My instinct is to dive deep; I want to give you all the information. Engineers work in several decimal places, very specific examples, detailed schematics, and simulations that justify every tradeoff and design decision. This level of detail is critical for standards or designing a circuit, but it can be a barrier when presenting to a broader audience. To be effective, I need to start with the "Why," share high-level data, and not get bogged down in the minutiae.
This is where AI becomes my bridge. I can input all the detailed contexts—the simulations, the data, the specs—into the tool. Then, I can ask it to help me target the message: "Summarize this for a non-technical executive, focusing on impact and goals."
In a few iterations, I get to a clear, concise message that would have taken me hours of rewriting to achieve on my own. It allows me to communicate the value of the work without compromising the engineering accuracy.
A culture of inclusive innovation
When you give everyone the time, space, and tools, you stop seeing "engineering projects" or "finance projects," you just see innovation linked to business value and impact. We’re seeing people from across the company—people who never thought of themselves as "inventors"—bridging the gap between an idea and a working prototype. And that’s the point.
At Okta, we’re building a future where your job title doesn’t define your potential. Through innovation, you become a change agent that shapes the future of your company and your career.
Ready to join a team that empowers everyone to build, create, and innovate? Explore open roles at Okta to find your next opportunity and help us shape the future of identity.
