Buy this cybersecurity stock as agentic AI grows, Barclays says
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It's time to buy Okta as a boom in the artificial intelligence industry fuels demand for identity-based security solutions, according to Barclays. The bank upgraded the cybersecurity software stock to overweight from equal weight. It also raised its price target to $90 from $85, implying 24.6% upside from Friday's close. The rating change come as "as identity moves to the top spending security priority in our CIO survey, checks improve intra-quarter on demand and execution, and we see upside from the agentic opportunity," analyst Saket Kalia said Monday in a note to clients. He noted that Okta has already shown several signs of developing its business and bringing in more customers. "Our recent checks on Okta have been incrementally better than prior quarters, with a more constructive and consistent tone across partners and customers, Kalia wrote. "We think this improvement reflects a mix of healthier underlying demand, improving execution and stronger channel engagement, in-line with management's partner- first messaging over the past few [quarters]." Okta is a cloud-based solution that enables clients to connect to multiple applications with a single credential using an identity and access management platform. It's a tool that could become useful, not just for humans, but for agentic AI bots as well. Agentic AI is a term for the set of tools and services that assist users with a variety of tasks, which has received considerable attention from technology giants over the past few months. The growing agentic AI trend could be an opportunity for Okta to bolster its business. "Agentic is starting to be viewed as an identity problem - agents are essentially extensions of human identities that operate at a much greater scale, which naturally pulls agent governance and assigning guardrails to those agents as an identity problem," Kalia wrote. "As a result, we are not be surprised to see multiple vendors trying to participate in this space and expect competition to pick up." To that end, "limited product availability" could put Okta on the path to clinching even more deals. Barclays' new rating falls in line with consensus on the Street. Of the 47 analysts covering Okta, 33 have a buy or strong buy on the stock, per LSEG. Barclays isn't the only shop on the Street that recently became bullish on Okta. Raymond James last week upped its rating on shares to outperform from market perform . Shares have declined 16% in the year to date, underperforming the overall market.