Kevin Akermanis on why AI is eating the security budget
“The funding for security teams has either flatlined or started to decrease. Money is coming from anywhere and everywhere to fund anything with the word AI in front of it.”
The episode
Kevin Akermanis is a solutions architect at Okta, working across Auth0 and Okta's enterprise customers in Asia Pacific. Before that he spent 15 years at Salesforce, in pre-sales architecture and then as Director of Technology & Architecture. He's worked at enterprise level to understand the complexities and challenges of introducing new technologies.
James and Kevin get into what happens when the business says we need AI now and the security budget goes backwards. Why agents are a new class of identity that guardrails alone cannot contain, and where a company that is not a pure tech company should actually start. It is the security conversation most teams are skipping.
What we get into
- Okta's customer security council found security funding flatlining or falling while money pours into anything labelled AI. Kevin explains why that is backwards.
- The three-tier architecture has collapsed. Experience and logic merged into the model, and security got pushed down to the data layer, where it has never had to live at that granularity.
- Agents are non-human identities: non-deterministic, able to roam, and guardrails are just suggestions. Scope them small and time-box them.
- Why the Australian market is asking for MCP, not agents. Your customers start in Claude, not on your website.
- The coming skill deficit: entry-level roles pushed onto AI, and nobody left to backfill the seniors. Plus how juniors can use AI to build knowledge instead of collecting answers.
- Where a tech-enabled company starts: internal first, read-only, inside the walled garden, and never an external-facing agent on day one.
Lines worth keeping
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“We actually found that the funding for security and the security teams has either flatlined or started to decrease. Money's just coming from anywhere and everywhere to fund anything that has the word AI in front of it.”
“You're not moving fast enough. But when something goes wrong, when there's a leak, when there's a breach, it is all your fault.”
“Agents are non-deterministic, so guardrails are okay, but they're just suggestions. They're not hard and fast. It can still decide to do something else on its own.”
“The agentic thing is a very North American message. What I'm finding on the Australian side is they much more care about MCP. People aren't going to come to my website and use my agent. They're going to go to Claude.”
“Without that underlying infrastructure, the data in the right accessible way, and then the security lens, we're just throwing another tool at a problem.”
Why it matters
Australian companies are pushing AI into production while security budgets go backwards. If your team is part human, part agent, this is how you scope it before the breach instead of explaining it after.
Chapters
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- Cold open: the business says we need to AI, now
- Welcome: Kevin Akermanis, Okta, 15 years at Salesforce
- Walled gardens, and why work AI feels worse than home AI
- Security funding has flatlined. The money went to AI
- The three-tier architecture has collapsed
- Breaches as the cost of doing business
- Whole new attack surfaces: agents, MCP, prompt attacks
- Who owns AI security now
- If you don't know what good looks like, everything looks great
- The coming skill deficit, and how juniors leapfrog
- Use AI to build knowledge, not to collect answers
- Consumption pricing and the SaaS devaluation
- Agents are non-human identities
- Token vaulting: give the agent the valet key
- Where to start: internal, read-only, walled garden
- Australia doesn't want agents. It wants MCP
- Sweat the asset: make your vendors do the work
- Kevin's personal stack and the spicy brain
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