Aaron Levie
@levie
ceo @box - unleash the power of your content with AI
Almost everything about how we’re building enterprise software products is changing right now. For years when you built SaaS products, your entire design focus was how a user would interact with the system to accomplish their task, by themselves or collaboratively. Now many of…
The intelligence for AI Agents for every vertical is just sitting in the best AI models right now waiting to be tapped into. The right domain understanding, tool calling, context engineering, and UX will unlock so many use cases. Then markets just grow as models improve.
America’s AI Action Plan is quite strong. It has a clear a mission to win the AI race and accelerate the development and use of AI by removing roadblocks or aiding adoption. Importantly, it focuses on the positive benefits of AI, which we’re all seeing every day.
One practice we’ve implemented in going AI-first at Box is every week someone demos their AI workflow to the whole company. Usually it’s something we never would’ve predicted. Good to balance central planning for tech and decentralization for use case adoption.
NVIDIA will be the first $10 trillion dollar company
The @xAI goal is 50 million in units of H100 equivalent-AI compute (but much better power-efficiency) online within 5 years
Systems of record arguably become more important with AI Agents. When we have 100X more agents than humans, we’ll care a lot about the workflows and data those agents are tied to. The deterministic parts of software are the guardrails that keep agents safe and on track.
.@Box CEO @levie on why AI agents can't keep a secret. "The reason why you probably won't see a complete compression of software where it's just a an agent and a database is because there's a lot of logic in the workflow and in the the company's specific sort of business process…
There’s likely too much fear that AI models eat the app layer as they improve. For AI Agents to work, most enterprises will require a bridge between the AI and their specific workflows. It turns out the last mile of making AI Agents work in real, highly variable and hostile…
There is so much opportunity right now in making AI Agents real for enterprises. The models pack insane capabilities, but to get them into the middle of an enterprise workflow requires significant scaffolding, domain understanding, and context engineering. This is the play.
Building AI Agents is an exercise in balancing deterministic and non-deterministic workflows. Too little agent free rein and you don’t benefit from the model’s intelligence. Too much and you’ll get security issues or haphazard results. This is why SaaS + Agents will remain.
Context engineering is increasingly the most critical component for building effective AI Agents in the enterprise right now. This will ultimately be the long pole in the tent for AI Agents adoption in most organizations. We need AI Agents that can deeply understand the context…
It’s wild how many AI Agent opportunities there are that are much bigger than their pre-AI markets. The TAM of the code editor market was a few billion dollars in 2020. AI coding agents could be a $50-100B+ market in the next 5-10 years. You can do this for many spaces.
In a world of AI Agents, the market size for SaaS grows vs. shrinks. Not only do you still need systems of record to manage enterprise data and workflows, but AI Agents create completely new value propositions for these tools. You’re bringing work to the customer now.
AI Turns Every SaaS App Into a TAM Explosion "For the first time ever, I can actually deploy my software for use cases where the customer didn't have users on the other end before to do those things. So I think you have a lot of TAM expansion." — @levie
Here’s the new ChatGPT agent combing through market and strategy data stored in Box to produce a powerpoint presentation. The ability for AI Agents to connect to data from anywhere, use a computer, and automate work in the background is going to be wild.
The software business model will be seats for the user and consumption for the agents. The big upside now is that there are many AI Agent opportunities where the TAM vastly exceeds the previous potential seat revenue. Because now you deliver work, not just enable it.
We’re at a point where we have the intelligence levels in models to build far more AI Agents than have been created thus far. Now is the time for bridging the AI to the customer with the right domain expertise, understanding vertical workflows, and context engineering.
maybe my hottest tech take rn is the AI models are good enough and we need product vision much more than technical vision at this point
At first it looked like the future was for AI to review our work. Productivity was capped by how fast we could work. Now, it looks like the future is that we’ll send off tasks to AI Agents and orchestrate and review their work. Making productivity nearly uncapped.
Aaron Levie says the future of work has flipped. We thought AI would fix our mistakes. Now it makes the first draft. We QA what comes back. “The human's job is to fix the AI errors, and that's the new way we are going to work.”
In the early days of cloud, most enterprises needed to be convinced of the importance. Now, at the similar time frame in AI rollout, even the most conservative companies recognize how significant AI will be. This creates an entirely different dynamic.
AI interest in the enterprise is growing far faster than the early days of cloud computing. Hear why from @levie in a discussion with @martin_casado on the @a16z podcast.
AI is going to change almost every aspect of work. There’s a window right now where the first AI native generation will be entering the workforce, and will have a ton they can teach the companies as they go AI-first. Every company should take this opportunity seriously.
“ If you are AI-native right now, coming out of college, the amount you can teach a company is unbelievable.” New grads: AI fluency is a superpower and a wedge into your next job. Big companies move slowly. If you can teach them how to move faster with AI, you’ll stand out.…
Hosted a dinner with about 15 IT leaders around the future of AI Agents in the enterprise. Here are a few updates on the state of the world at least at some large enterprises: * For many organizations, the demand from the business for AI is continuing outstrip the ability to…
Meta just announced its massive new superintelligence data center. What’s amazing these will just become digital factories for AI Agents doing work 24/7 on our behalf.
