As companies scale, the identity decisions they make now will determine how ready they'll be for what's coming next: a workforce that increasingly includes AI agents.
What does it take to build an identity foundation that can flex from a scrappy startup to thousands of employees, and eventually, to thousands of agents? HubSpot and Modern Treasury are two organizations that prioritized identity early and are now positioned to extend that same rigor to agentic identity.
HubSpot: scaling securely from startup to 8,800+ employees
HubSpot's relationship with Okta dates back 14 years, spanning the company's evolution from manual Active Directory provisioning to phishing-resistant, passwordless-by-default access as it scaled through hypergrowth and rising phishing threats.
The results speak to the value of that long-term investment: an 80% drop in help-desk provisioning tickets, 100% of logins now completed via registered devices with phishing-resistant MFA, and a fleet-wide phishing-resistant enforcement rollout completed in just four months
“Good security is not just about locking everything down, it’s also low friction and easy to use,” says Andrew Meinert, Director of System Operations at HubSpot. “Okta gives us the flexibility to add more friction where we need it while maintaining a simple, easy experience everywhere else.”
That balance has also let HubSpot's team support a scaling business without adding headcount—automation absorbing the operational weight that would otherwise fall on IT and security staff.
And as HubSpot looks ahead, Meinert is already thinking past human employees. "Okta's early approach to agent identity and authorization is the right one," he says. "As our agents multiply, we're excited to talk to the Okta product team about how we should be thinking about agents and how they're thinking about them. I feel confident going into uncharted territory together."
Modern Treasury: identity as the backbone for a regulated, fast-moving fintech
Modern Treasury's story starts from a different scale but the same conviction. With roughly 200 employees managing more than 140 cloud applications and handling regulated financial data, the company's CTO treated identity as a foundational priority from day one—meaning Modern Treasury never had to go back and retrofit its approach.
That early discipline is now paying dividends in efficiency: more than 75% of offboarding is automated, offboarding time has dropped from days to under an hour, and access requests have been reduced to a single Slack message.
“Now we can just hit a button, run our campaigns, and periodically check our dashboard,” says Mark Jeffries, Workplace Technology Manager. “We don’t have to disrupt our end users’ days to collect the data we need, it just runs in the background.”
But Modern Treasury isn't stopping at streamlining human access. The company is actively building its strategy for securing AI agents, working to strike the right balance between automation and secure access.
“I'm excited to see the same consistency I’ve found in Okta’s product suite and the OIN showing up in what we’re exploring with Okta for AI agents,” Jeffries says. “Okta has already proven that it can support our people, and we have to treat our growing number of agents as human-esque. Okta feels like part of our natural path forward for securing AI.”
Identity is the foundation
The organizations that will scale securely into the agentic future aren't the ones scrambling to bolt on agent governance after the fact. They're the ones—like HubSpot and Modern Treasury—that have spent years treating identity as core infrastructure, so when its time to for agents to scale, the foundation is already there to support them.
Want to hear more about how leaders are preparing for the agentic future? Join us at Oktane, September 22–24 in Las Vegas. Register now.
