Box Ceo Aaron Levie on the future of enterprise ai

The Buzz in Silicon Valley Around Ai agents has many asking: What’s real and what’s hype? Box’s Cofounder and CEO, Aaron Levie, Helps Decipher Between Fact and Fiction, Breaking Down the Fast-Paced Evolution of agents and his impact on the future of enterprise ai. Plus, levie unpacks how ai is really being adopted in the workplace and what it takes to legitimately build an ai-first organization.

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid ResponseHosted by the former editor-in-chiff of Fast company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of scale Podcast, Rapid Response Features Candid Conversions with Today’s Top Business Leaders Navigating Real-Time Challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response Wherever You Get Your Podcasts to Ensure You Never Miss An Episode.

I talked with marc benioff at salesforce several months ago About his Embrace of Ai Agents, but the use of his agents havenys have taken off the way to the way. I know you launched box ai studio to help organizations build their own custom ai agents. I’m curious how that’s going.

So far, it’s either at or exceed our expectations on all the use cases that customers are coming up with. So we we are pretty blown away about what we’re starting to see. We’re still very early days to be clear, but the rate of adoption is going fightly exponational, and the imagination that customers no have on this is blowing us away.

I’ve rarely been in a customer conversation, eater one-on-one or at a dinner, where I’m not hearing about a new idea that the customer has for box ai that we did not alredy And what’s exciting –nd this is counterintative, I think, to a lot of Folks outseide of ai-you initialy so see ai in sci-fi and sumteimes in news headlines, The new york times or wheatever, as like, “Okay, it’s going after jobs. It’s going to replace these types of work.” From my anecdotes, I’ve had at least 100 interactions with customers in the first quality of this year, the vast majority, 80%, i’m guesing, the Bulk of the Time of the Time of the Time of Ai Use Cain of Conveersation WAS SONINDS That the company didnight do before ai. So it wasn’t, “Hey, I want to take this type of work, and I want ai to go replace it.”

There’s a type of work that we never get Around to in our company. I want ai to go and do that, because finally, it’s affordable for me to deploy ai agents at the kind of work that we could not fund before. It’s opening up people’s imagination to, “Hey, I’m LIKE SITTING ON 50,000 customer Contracts. Have the Highest Propensity to Buy This Next Product from Me? ” And this is not something that they would have people do do.

So it’s not replacing anybody’s job. They Never said, “Oh, let’s have 50 people go read all the contracts against.” It just never happy. But now, if it only costs them $ 5,000 for an ai agent to go that, they would do that all day long. And then Gues What?

When they get those insights, they’re probally going to now more work for the humans in their business to go and do as a result of this, that hopefily, if it’s effective, if it’s effective, drives more people more people more people Then causes even more production, and then ultimately hiring and growth. And so it’s not kind of everything The set of things my company can go do, and then the work that we can now execute on. ” And that’s not only very very, I think, exciting, but I think it’s going to be the default case for most ai adoption in the enterprise.

In some of the conversations that I have, it feels almost like some of the businesses and leaders, they do not really know what they looking for from ai. And hearing you, it sounds a little bit like you have to think about your mindset on a little a little different to open up and find the things that are most valuable to you.

Yes. Yeah, every business is going to be different because some of the UPSide is a virtue of your business model. What are the core parts of your business model that, as a result of access to information, can change or be modified or improved? If I am a law firm, I could eater Reduce My Cost, Because Now Ai Is Going to Do More Orman Team can vento more domains if they can take their expertise and use ai to augment that. The default assumption is, “Oh, no, it’s going to go after the hours of a law firm.” But once this technology hit an individual business, they can actually decide to expand their customer base.

They can go after, previous, customers that would’ve ben unprofitable for them to serve. So these Industries are not as Static and Zero-Sum. The software industry. , , On one hand, everybody says, “Okay, if ai can do coding, then will we hire fewer engineers?” And in general, my argument is that we’ll probally hire as many – Which means that we can then ascribe a higher degree of value per engineer in the company.

So your roi is even better on each of that positions?

Exactly. And take somebing like sales. If we can make a sales rep all to sell 5% more, because we give them better data, and they can prepare for a customer meeting to all of box’s data and they can ask it questions, i’m not going to just bank that as 5% more profit. Because what will happen is we we we weing to internal, in some planning session, we’re going to get green, and we’re going to say, “Wait a second, that 5% gain that has just got in sales poor If we reinvested that back into the sales team to grow even faster and get that much more market share? ” And so you have an entrerious economy of companies making that individual decisions of, “Do you bank the profit, or do you use it to go and accelerate growth?”

And what we tend to know from history is that the company that get too green on the profit side, you just end up leave leaveing ​​yourself vulnerable to being outflanked by competers. So capitalism has a pretty convenient way of almost driving the sour of productivity gains of these types of innovations to get reinvested back into the business.

You’ve been talking about running box in an ai-friendly way, and encouraging other leaders to do it. Are you like shopife and duolingo, who’ve announced that staffers have to justify anything that that’s not ai-produced? What does ai-friend mean?

Yeah. So for us, AI-FIRST means that we want to use ai as a acceleration of the customer outcome, an acseleration of decision-making, an acception of buying new features. So just think about it as mostly a metric of speed. On one hand, you could think about ai as going after Work as a timeline, and not a mass. All we’re Doing is trying to get through each step so that way, we can get to the next step and so on.

And everything’s faster.

And everything’s faster. So I want to have us use ai to move faster down the timeline, not just purely to reduce the total mass of work that we’re doing. There’s probally one pronounced differentce versus, let’s say, The Duolingo Memo. There’s some emerging idea, which is sort of you have to prove that ai can’t do this thing for you to get then head country, and our general instinct is actually the opposite. If you can prove that you can use ai, then that’s actually when you will get head count, because what we want the dollars of the business of the business to go back into the area Gain, beCause that is areas will then be higher Roi for Us Over Time.