Okta president Eric Kelleher says managers are the biggest hurdle to AI adoption: ‘We have trained every manager in the world to think about one thing...’

Okta President and COO Eric Kelleher has identified the biggest challenge for companies in adopting artificial intelligence (AI). He believes that the biggest hurdle to AI adoption is not the technology itself but the way managers have been trained to think about work, budgets and organisational structures. Speaking at the COO Summit, Kelleher said companies have largely figured out how to experiment with AI tools and agents. He argued that the more difficult task is convincing managers to redesign work around a workforce that includes both humans and AI agents.“We have trained every manager in the world to think about one thing, and that is: what’s their headcount. Our managers have spent decades learning how to think about headcounts and payroll,” Kelleher said at the event, as reported by Fortune.Kelleher said he is encouraging Okta managers to move beyond traditional workforce planning and begin budgeting for both human and digital labour. He argued that AI agents should increasingly be viewed as part of the workforce rather than simply another software tool.“One of the things I’m really advocating for within Okta is to get our managers thinking about how to design work to include human workers and digital workers,” he added. According to Kelleher, integrating AI into day-to-day operations is "a much harder problem than getting people to experiment with Claude Code."Kelleher's comments come as companies across industries seek to translate AI experimentation into measurable productivity gains. His proposed solution is what he calls a shift from workforce planning to "work planning". This approach focuses on how tasks are distributed between people and AI agents rather than simply counting employees.“What we want to start seeing is how do work charts evolve where we have digital workers working alongside human colleagues,” Kelleher said.He argued that much of the current discussion around AI is centred on job displacement rather than on how technology could reshape the nature of work itself. The executive revealed that AI agents already play a visible role within his team. Kelleher said his own understanding of AI deepened during a flight to Bengaluru, where he spent the entire journey building an open-source AI agent. He has assigned names such as Leo, Sloan, Hank and Walker to agents used by his organisation, and they appear alongside human employees in business reviews.Kelleher believes many organisations still treat AI the same way they once treated traditional software, something employees use rather than something integrated into workforce planning. He recalled a turning point when he asked employees to give their AI agents names during a team meeting.“In that exercise, AI became a colleague as opposed to a tool, and that catalyst is valuable,” he said.Comparing the current AI transition to the shift from steam power to electricity, Kelleher said many businesses are still approaching AI as an add-on rather than redesigning work around it.“I see the future now, and it’s clear to me, we're not going back,” he told Fortune. Later, reflecting on the role of AI agents inside organisations, he added: “It’s really uncomfortable, but it’s very transformative.”For Kelleher, the next stage of AI adoption will depend less on technological breakthroughs and more on whether managers can rethink decades-old assumptions about teams, budgets and organisational design.“We evolve from workforce planning to work planning. What I’m finding right now is that’s a really big leap for people to make,” he added.