The Dex AI agent is helping Okta Inc. streamline employee support. It also serves as a testbed for the identity controls the company offers customers.

After surpassing last year’s goal of saving 250,000 employee hours, Okta raised this year’s target to 1 million. The expanded effort helps the company prioritize technology investments, according to Jenna Cline (pictured), senior vice president of technology, data and intelligence at Okta.

“This year we said, ‘Let’s go big.’ About a month for every employee would be 1 million hours. That includes a lot of AI this year [and] some automation as well, because we still have a lot of deterministic workflows that we put into our systems,” she said. “But the combination of all those things is how we came up with the 1 million hours.”

Cline spoke with theCUBE Research’s Krista Case and co-host Rebecca Knight at Okta’s Oktane event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Dex’s orchestration model, productivity goals and identity controls for agents. (* Disclosure below.)

Dex AI agent routes work to specialized agents

Okta wanted to avoid creating a “swivel chair” problem as individual business teams introduced their own agents. Dex gives employees a common interface without requiring the company to build one agent capable of handling every task, according to Cline.

“Dex can call upon the right sub-agent. That agent is scoped to only work on certain things, so it’s very secure and it’s very efficient because it does one thing really well,” she said. “But Dex can do that for other agents; it can do that for the expense team [and] it can do that for our IT help desk.”

Okta applies its own identity technology to Dex, registering the agent in Universal Directory and deploying capabilities from Okta for AI Agents. Using the Dex AI agent as a testbed gives the company an enterprise environment in which to evaluate emerging features before they become generally available, according to Cline.

“We got to work with the product team,” she said. “They took feedback from what we were trying to do in order to make our product stronger.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Okta’s Oktane event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Okta’s Oktane event. Neither Okta, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE