Barclays Initiates Coverage on Okta, Inc. (OKTA) with ‘Equal-Weight’ Rating Amid Growing IAM Market Competition

We recently compiled a list of the 15 AI News Shaping Wall Street Today. In this article, we are going to take a look at where Okta, Inc. (NASDAQ:OKTA) stands against the other AI stocks that are shaping Wall Street today.

In recent news reported by Reuters, a U.S. congressional commission proposed a Manhattan Project-style initiative to fund the development of AI systems that will be as smart, or even smarter, than humans. The proposition is amid the intensifying competition from China over advanced technologies.

“We’ve seen throughout history that countries that are first to exploit periods of rapid technological change can often cause shifts in the global balance of power. China is racing towards AGI … It’s critical that we take them extremely seriously”

– Jacob Helberg, a USCC commissioner told Reuters

Helberg, while recognizing that energy infrastructure is a significant bottleneck for training large AI models, suggests that streamlining the permitting process for data centers is one way of enabling a public-private partnership that could accelerate AI development.

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This news follows a rumor that artificial intelligence models are hitting a “wall”. Separate sources, including Reuters, The Information, and Bloomberg, have reported that companies such as OpenAI are failing in their next endeavors. Unnamed sources have claimed that OpenAI’s Orion is “so far not considered to be as big a step up from OpenAI’s existing models as GPT-4 was from GPT-3.5.”

However, OpenAI is pushing back on these rumors, stating that there is “no wall”. Despite having not reached a wall, analysts do admit that it’s possible to have reached a turning point.

“We haven’t seen a breakthrough model in a while. Part of it is that we’ve exhausted all the human data, and so just throwing more compute at the same data may not yield better results.”

– Gil Luria, managing director at investment group D.A. Davidson

Gary Marcus, NYU professor emeritus and outspoken critic of AI hype, has this to say:

“The economics are likely to be grim. LLMs will not disappear, even if improvements diminish, but the economics will likely never make sense…”

For this article, we selected AI stocks by going through news articles, stock analysis, and press releases. These stocks are also popular among hedge funds.

Why are we interested in the stocks that hedge funds pile into? The reason is simple: our research has shown that we can outperform the market by imitating the top stock picks of the best hedge funds. Our quarterly newsletter’s strategy selects 14 small-cap and large-cap stocks every quarter and has returned 275% since May 2014, beating its benchmark by 150 percentage points (see more details here).

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A mobile application developer programming on a tablet, illustrating the power of the company’s adaptive multi-factor authentication.

Okta, Inc. (NASDAQ:OKTA)

Number of Hedge Fund Holders: 47

Okta, Inc. (NASDAQ:OKTA) is a workplace cybersecurity company operating as an identity partner. Its AI-driven features across its Customer Identity Cloud and Workplace Identity Cloud helps clients take control of their digital presence.

On November 19, Barclays initiated coverage of Okta, Inc. (NASDAQ:OKTA) with an “Equal-Weight” rating and $81 price target. According to the analyst, Okta competes rapidly in the growing $20 billion identity and access management (IAM) market. The top two players own 40% of the market. While Microsoft leads in the Workforce IAM sector, Okta embraces the top position in the fast-growing customer IAM sector. Notably, Okta integrates AI-powered capabilities across both its Workforce Identity Cloud and Customer Identity Cloud. Moreover, Barclays is below fiscal 2026 consensus estimates for Okta on revenue.

Overall OKTA ranks 13th on our list of the AI stocks that are shaping Wall Street today. While we acknowledge the potential of OKTA as an investment, our conviction lies in the belief that some AI stocks hold greater promise for delivering higher returns and doing so within a shorter timeframe. If you are looking for an AI stock that is more promising than OKTA but that trades at less than 5 times its earnings, check out our report about the cheapest AI stock.

READ NEXT: 8 Best Wide Moat Stocks to Buy Now and 30 Most Important AI Stocks According to BlackRock.

Disclosure: None. This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.