PGA of America cuts identity layers to keep AI agents in check, CTO says

Scott told Krista Case and Rebecca Knight, in an interview broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio, that his team is deliberately small. He said spending half of the technology budget on administering systems would not produce anything customers would thank the organization for.

Instead of managing more infrastructure layers, the association has removed them. With fewer systems in place, identity controls are less likely to fragment across different user groups, Scott said. He described managing the same use case or persona across multiple systems as the point where organizations run into trouble.

AI agents add pressure because they can reach enterprise tools and data on behalf of employees. The PGA of America keeps that environment relatively centralized: employees are steered toward a common AI platform, and identity controls are applied around technologies such as MCP and agent gateways rather than allowing independent agents to multiply across the organization. Scott said the aim is to make the organization's own platform the best option and to use "gravity" to create the right defaults for people, which lets the association know where agents run and authenticate each independent user.

AI adoption has also widened who takes part in technology decisions. As deployments touch employee workflows, governance and business processes, the PGA of America is bringing finance, human resources, legal and technology closer together. Scott said a shared understanding among those functions has become more important, and that standalone technology decisions are harder to justify than they once were.

New tools and use cases pass through an internal council, and human review remains central to deployment, according to Scott. He argued that organizations can still move quickly, but that firsthand experience with the technology determines how well teams judge vendors and decide what to build themselves.

"You build that up by experience," Scott said. "Turns out a lot of the stuff's actually easier than you might think. My comment of confidence is that it's all learnable."

The interview was conducted at Oktane as part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE's coverage of the event. TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Oktane; neither Okta nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

Editor's Summary

The PGA of America has eliminated data centers, VPNs, Active Directory and its traditional corporate network, using Okta and Auth0 to keep identity management centralized as it runs AI agents in production. The association routes employees to a single AI platform and vets new tools through an internal council that includes finance, human resources and legal. The account comes from an interview with chief technology officer Kevin Scott at Okta's Oktane event, broadcast by theCUBE.