Guardrails Are Just Suggestions: Securing AI Agents with Okta's Kevin Akermanis

The business wants AI, and it wants it now. Meanwhile security budgets are flatlining, breaches are becoming a line item, and AI agents can wander places no one scoped them for.

In this episode of Building Tech Teams, James MacDonald sits down with Kevin Akermanis — Solutions Architect at Okta and a 15-year Salesforce veteran — to unpack what really happens when enterprises rush AI into production: security funding flatlining while every dollar with "AI" in front of it gets funded, breaches becoming the cost of doing business, and a collapsed architecture that pushes security all the way down to the data layer.

They dig into why AI agents are a new class of non-human identity that behaves nothing like a service account, why guardrails are only suggestions for something non-deterministic, and the scoped, time-limited, valet-key approach that actually contains the risk. They also tackle the harder people problem: if juniors get automated out, who backfills the seniors — and why knowing what good looks like still beats anything you can vibe-code. Practical, sceptical, no hype.

About the guest

Kevin Akermanis is a Solutions Architect at Okta, the digital identity and security company behind Auth0, where he works across the Asia Pacific region on identity, security and agentic AI. Before Okta he spent roughly 15 years at Salesforce across pre-sales and an internal CTO role, giving him a rare view from both the selling and buying sides of enterprise tech.

Building Tech Teams is produced by Day One®, trusted partners in the technology space and the production partner behind Blackbird Ventures' Wild Hearts. Sister shows include First Cheque, Oversubscribed and In The Blink of AI. Episodes are cross-promoted across the network.