By Angela Palumbo

Okta stock surged Thursday after a Raymond James said the growing use of artificial intelligence agents will be a boon for the software company.

Analyst Adam Tindle upgraded shares of Okta to Outperform from Market Perform and gave the stock an $85 price target on Thursday. That implies a 26% gain from the stock's last closing price of $67.35.

Okta is a software firm that helps organizations manage digital identities. Shares have dropped 17% this year and 75% from their all-time closing high of $291.78 on Feb. 12, 2021 as Wall Street has rotated out of software stocks. The concern is companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are building AI models that might one day replace software capabilities.

Okta has said the changes that AI is bringing to enterprises provide opportunities for growth. The company has touted that as AI agents -- which automate tasks for users -- become more common in enterprises' workflows, Okta can offer a way to manage the "non-human identities." Tindle agrees.

"Our recent conversations with channel partners suggest that AI is beginning to move from the experimentation to the production phase in Enterprise use cases, and agents that have previously been using human identity security will now need their own identity security," Tindle wrote in a note.

"We see the potential for a significant unit TAM [total addressable market] increase for Okta's core market due to Agents in the workforce," he added.

Okta, which was a Barron's stock pick in February, climbed 4.8% on Thursday to $70.75.

Write to Angela Palumbo at angela.palumbo@dowjones.com

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April 16, 2026 10:37 ET (14:37 GMT)

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