Aaron Levie on AI's Enterprise Adoption

Aaron Levie 0:00 AI is going to take over the enterprise. We know this is going to happen, and we- it needs to happen to us faster than it happens to our competitors, which is a totally different dynamic than we saw with cloud. What is the journey over the next decade? It's about the speed at which humans can change their workflows. How fast can somebody use a computer to do something? To type an email, to write code, to generate a marketing asset. When that's no longer a limiter, how do these jobs begin to change?

Martin Casado 0:22 It's so strange to me how many disruptions are happening all at the same time. [upbeat music]

Martin Casado 0:35 Aaron, thank you very much for joining us.

Aaron Levie 0:36 Thank you.

Martin Casado 0:37 Ev- everybody here already knows you. However, I still think you should intro yourself-

Aaron Levie 0:40 Sure

Martin Casado 0:41 ... just for, just for completeness.

Aaron Levie 0:42 Okay. Uh, Aaron Levie, uh, CEO, co-founder of Box. And, uh, at Box, we help enterprises basically take, uh, all of their unstructured data or enterprise content and turn it into valuable information. Um, and AI is, is absolutely this, uh, incredible accelerant for, for that problem.

Martin Casado 0:59 I just learned that we're investors in you. [laughs]

Aaron Levie 1:02 You... Well, many years ago.

Martin Casado 1:03 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 1:03 Many years ago. So, uh, uh, no, no claims post-IPO. Actually, um, uh, Ben Horowitz had this, um, early, uh, kind of blog post on basically, I think it was the, titled The Fat Startup.

Martin Casado 1:14 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 1:14 Um, and-

Martin Casado 1:15 Yeah, yeah, yeah. In response to [laughs] -

Aaron Levie 1:17 The lean startup movement

Martin Casado 1:17 ... enterprises, the lean startup theory.

Aaron Levie 1:18 Yeah.

Martin Casado 1:18 That's right.

Aaron Levie 1:18 And we, uh, let's just say we very much took that to heart.

Martin Casado 1:21 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 1:21 Um, and we, uh, uh, we, we basically, like, deployed every single lesson, which was, like, the name of the game is you get big fast, you scale a- aggressively. And,

Aaron Levie 1:32 um, and that was, that was a very important kind of period in, in our company's journey.

Martin Casado 1:35 So the, the, the notional topic of this is AI in the enterprise. Um, but I think it's good to be kind of nuanced about this 'cause it's less obvious than people think, and you've been talking a lot about AI on X, but also, you know, you're thinking about it in the terms of your business. So let me just kind of set up the first question-

Aaron Levie 1:53 Sure

Martin Casado 1:54 ... as follows, which is what's... You know, AI has historically been this very B2B enterprise thing.

Aaron Levie 1:58 Yeah.

Martin Casado 1:58 Like chatbots or whatever, you know, um, personalization systems. But what's unique about GenAI is a lot of the use cases are actually, like, consumer or prosumer, right? Think, like, creativity or developers, and it actually hasn't made intros as much into the enterprise yet. It's just starting now.

Aaron Levie 2:16 Yep.

Martin Casado 2:17 So maybe just a couple of questions. First off, like, A, does that match with your experience? And then, B, how are you thinking about, you know, this transition to the enterprise?

Aaron Levie 2:27 Yeah. I think if you were to pro- probably, like, do the, the idiosyncrasies of AI and then reverse engineer why that was the journey, um, basically up until, let's say, pre-ChatGPT moment, AI was extremely hard to use.

Martin Casado 2:41 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 2:41 It required, in many cases, having custom models for basically every problem you tried to solve.

Martin Casado 2:46 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 2:46 And so there was almost no way that a consumer ecosystem could flourish-

Martin Casado 2:50 Yeah

Aaron Levie 2:50 ... you know, based on that. It was not, it was just, it was not generalizable enough. There was really few products other than, like, maybe Siri, Alexa, et cetera-

Martin Casado 2:56 Yeah

Aaron Levie 2:56 ... that you'd interact with that would even have some sense of AI. Um, and so enterprises were the, the, you know, early adopters of AI systems to bring automation and, and workflows, uh,

Aaron Levie 3:07 to, to, uh, work- workflow automation to their, um, companies. Then boom, ChatGPT happens, and all of a sudden it's the exact right form factor-

Martin Casado 3:14 Yeah

Aaron Levie 3:14 ... for mass adoption.

Martin Casado 3:15 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 3:15 There's no startup costs. It costs, uh, you know, two minutes to, uh, two seconds to learn the product. You just... It's a chat interface.

Martin Casado 3:21 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 3:21 So it was, like, perfectly ripe for just taking off in the consumer space.

Martin Casado 3:24 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 3:24 Um, and, and then, you know, you have, uh, also these incredible conditions, uh, set up for mass adoption. You have billions of people on the internet.

Martin Casado 3:33 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 3:33 It was set up as a free product.

Martin Casado 3:35 Yep.

Aaron Levie 3:35 Um, uh, again, it, it kind of solved this sort of latent kind of question mark that everybody had, which was like, when are we gonna see AI, you know, touch-

Martin Casado 3:43 Work [laughs]

Aaron Levie 3:43 ... touch work and touch our lives?

Martin Casado 3:44 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 3:44 And so all, everything was kind of, like, the perfect conditions to, to get mass consumer adoption. On the enterprise side, um, you, you, you have, uh, unfortunately kind of the opposite, right? You have, you have-

Martin Casado 3:55 Lots of workflows

Aaron Levie 3:56 ... lots of workflows that have been kind of ingrained for decades and decades. You have lots of legacy IT systems that have data-

Martin Casado 4:02 Yeah

Aaron Levie 4:02 ... kind of not set up well to be accessed by AI.

Martin Casado 4:05 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 4:06 Um, you have a sort of shadow IT problem-

Martin Casado 4:08 Yeah

Aaron Levie 4:08 ... which is, which is most corporations don't want, you know, end users just injecting, you know, text into prompts that might contain information that the AI models could learn off of. So it's sort of a, a, a difficult environment for that same level of virality.

Martin Casado 4:22 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 4:23 With the exception of a few of these prosumer categories, um, I'm... you know, I have talked to, uh, large corporation, um, you know, CIOs that are seeing people just show up with Windsurf and Cursor and Replit.

Martin Casado 4:34 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 4:35 And so you're getting actually this sort of shadow IT version that we saw 15 years ago.

Martin Casado 4:38 But dev, dev tools has always been thought of that way.

Aaron Levie 4:39 Dev tools have always had that. Yeah.

Martin Casado 4:40 Okay.

Aaron Levie 4:40 100% fair. 100%. So dev tools have had that. Um, but I think that you're, you're still seeing that now in ChatG- the ChatGPT kind of-

Martin Casado 4:47 Yeah

Aaron Levie 4:47 ... leakage into organizations.

Martin Casado 4:48 Right.

Aaron Levie 4:48 I'm, I'm sure their consum- their, their prosumer inside of a corporation firewall-

Martin Casado 4:52 Right

Aaron Levie 4:52 ... usage is off the charts.

Martin Casado 4:54 Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 4:54 Even, even separate from the people that pay for it.

Martin Casado 4:56 Totally.

Aaron Levie 4:56 Um, so now the question though is, is, like, what is the journey over the next decade-

Martin Casado 5:01 Yeah

Aaron Levie 5:01 ... for the real change management of deployment of AI systems-

Martin Casado 5:04 Yeah

Aaron Levie 5:05 ... that drive the more, like, GDP-changing-

Martin Casado 5:08 Yeah

Aaron Levie 5:08 ... productivity gains?

Martin Casado 5:09 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 5:09 And that, that's something where I do think we have to be prepared for. This is many years. It's about the speed at which humans can change their workflows as opposed to how kind of quickly the technology can just, you know, sort of evolve and advance.

Martin Casado 5:21 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 5:21 And so we in Silicon Valley, and certainly anybody tuning into this, sort of imagines like, well, why doesn't the breakthrough that we just saw get released, why isn't that, you know, permeate every corporation-

Martin Casado 5:30 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Aaron Levie 5:30 ... within six months?

Martin Casado 5:31 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 5:31 And it's because, like, people just, like, have meetings and they have budget, you know, pr- processes, and they have to go through a governance council, and they have to get compliance on board.

Martin Casado 5:39 Yeah. The operational models.

Aaron Levie 5:39 And they have to figure out, like, who has the liability when the-

Martin Casado 5:41 Right

Aaron Levie 5:42 ... when the thing recommends this stock, and then they, you know, uh, the financial services provider shares that with a client. Like-

Martin Casado 5:47 Yeah

Aaron Levie 5:47 ... that takes years.

Martin Casado 5:48 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 5:48 And there's gonna be case law that needs to happen.

Martin Casado 5:50 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 5:50 And we still have lawsuits that are going on about-

Martin Casado 5:52 Yeah

Aaron Levie 5:52 ... who owns the IP of this stuff. So, so that, that

Aaron Levie 5:55 part is gonna take years. What, what's interesting, and I think you'll, you'll especially appreciate this on the cloud side, is, um, I remember when we-First we're scaling up in the enterprise, let's say 2007, 2008, 2009. You know, let's say that three to five-year period.

Martin Casado 6:09 Mm.

Aaron Levie 6:09 Post-AWS, post kind of cloud starting the, its journey, basically to a T, every conversation you'd have with a CIO or a group of CIOs was basically like, "Yeah, that's nice. Maybe some little corner of our organization could use this."

Martin Casado 6:22 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 6:22 "We are never gonna go fully to the cloud."

Martin Casado 6:24 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 6:24 You know, they, they had their arms, you know-

Martin Casado 6:26 I remember

Aaron Levie 6:26 ... wrapped around their servers.

Martin Casado 6:27 I remember, yeah.

Aaron Levie 6:27 Yeah, and, and, and, and basically they did not wanna give up the infrastructure. They... There was too many questions, too many compliance issues. There was, you know, l- just job, you know, existential job questions-

Martin Casado 6:38 Yeah

Aaron Levie 6:38 ... of like, "Well, what happens when-

Martin Casado 6:39 Sure

Aaron Levie 6:39 ... this, you know, gets delivered as a service?" Here's what's super interesting. Let's say we're now two years into, two and a half years into the ChatGPT moment.

Martin Casado 6:46 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 6:46 That same s- group of CIO conversations, none of that. It is basically assumed-

Martin Casado 6:51 Wow

Aaron Levie 6:51 ... it is, it is basically fully assumed that AI is going to take over the enterprise.

Martin Casado 6:55 Whoa.

Aaron Levie 6:55 Um, like the CEO, the CIO, the CDO, every jo- every, you know, org leader is basically like, "We know this is going to happen."

Martin Casado 7:02 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 7:03 This is not, uh, this is not like a, a we're trying to kinda push it off. It is purely a sequence of events. Who do I deploy? How do I deploy it?

Martin Casado 7:11 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 7:11 How do I drive the change management? Is the model ready? So what's really interesting is I think the level of buy-in you have now in the enterprise is, like, five times be- you know, greater than we had in the early days of cloud. And you can even see it. Like, the, to me, the classic witness, uh, test was, um, if you remember like 15 years ago, I think Jamie Dimon was probably most famous for saying like, "We're never gonna go to the cloud."

Martin Casado 7:33 Yes. [laughs]

Aaron Levie 7:33 So, like, they basically said JPMorgan will never go to the cloud.

Martin Casado 7:35 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 7:36 You know, today, that equivalent commentary, whether... I don't have a perfect Jamie, uh, a Jamie Dimon quote, but David Solomon at Goldman Sachs has given this anecdote of they can write now an SEC filing or an S1 for an IPO-

Martin Casado 7:47 Yeah, yeah

Aaron Levie 7:48 ... in like a few minutes.

Martin Casado 7:49 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 7:49 That used to take a number of analysts, you know-

Martin Casado 7:50 Yeah

Aaron Levie 7:50 ... a, a, a few days.

Martin Casado 7:52 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 7:52 And so the fact that they're, like those are the anecdotes already coming out of the biggest banks-

Martin Casado 7:57 Yeah

Aaron Levie 7:57 ... means that we're not in like a, like a fear of AI world. We're in a we know this is going to happen, and w- it needs to happen to us faster than it happens to our competitors, which is a totally different dynamic than we saw with

Aaron Levie 8:08 cloud.

Martin Casado 8:08 So do you think this has implications for companies today that are building products that are, you know, pre-AP- or pre-AI products? So for example, with the cloud wave, you know, you basically had a bunch of cloud native companies that ended up, you know, taking over, right?

Aaron Levie 8:23 Yeah.

Martin Casado 8:23 Like, so for example, Snowflake is a great example of this, which is like the ones that, you know, decided not to go all in and were hybrid. Like, hybrid i- it kind of became known as like means it won't work. [laughs]

Aaron Levie 8:33 Right.

Martin Casado 8:33 Like, you know, anything called hybrid, like, hasn't worked.

Aaron Levie 8:36 [laughs] Yeah.

Martin Casado 8:36 And they get to do the-

Aaron Levie 8:36 Yeah.

Martin Casado 8:36 So, so do you think because the buyer and the enterprise is more ready that, like, companies that are pre-AI have more of an opportunity, or do you think that, you know, you're gonna see the same thing with a lot of, like, AI native companies do well?

Aaron Levie 8:51 I, I'm gonna basically give you the non-answer of, I think both.

Martin Casado 8:54 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 8:54 Um, and one benefit that, that the cloud cohort has or the SaaS, you know, kind of post like us all understanding and agreeing on what SaaS would look like, what, what we all have is we were, we... Whether, whether we li- you know, adhered to this perfectly or not, you know, is a question, but we basically all tried to build API-first platforms.

Martin Casado 9:12 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 9:13 And so, um, or at least like API kind of like equal platforms. So we have the UI, and we have the API.

Martin Casado 9:18 Mm-hmm.

Aaron Levie 9:19 And if you think about it, like age- AI and AI agents are like the perfect, you know, consumers-

Martin Casado 9:23 Yeah

Aaron Levie 9:23 ... of an API.

Martin Casado 9:24 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 9:24 Right?

Martin Casado 9:25 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 9:25 And, and so they basically become these super users within your system-

Martin Casado 9:29 Yeah

Aaron Levie 9:29 ... on your APIs.

Martin Casado 9:30 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 9:30 So, so if I had to just say, "Okay, I want to au- I wanna deploy agents to go and automate my ServiceNow workflows-"

Martin Casado 9:37 Yeah

Aaron Levie 9:37 ... I think I'm, I'm better off just deploying the ServiceNow agent to go do that-

Martin Casado 9:40 Yeah

Aaron Levie 9:41 ... than do an entire reinvention of my ITSM system-

Martin Casado 9:44 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Aaron Levie 9:45 ... to solve that use case. And you can just go down the list. Like Workday, if I want an AI agent to do some kind of HR-related task, I think I'm better off to just do that within Workday than I am b- building an entire new system. So, so you have a bunch of different factors versus the pre-cloud days. Like

Aaron Levie 10:00 pre-cloud to post-cloud was a, an entire rewriting of your software.

Martin Casado 10:02 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 10:02 You had to go from single tenant to multi-tenant.

Martin Casado 10:04 Yep.

Aaron Levie 10:05 The scaling of the systems were totally different. Even the functionality and, and application logic was different because, like, well, it should be real time. It should be collaborative. It shouldn't be as, as sort of async and batches as-

Martin Casado 10:14 Yeah

Aaron Levie 10:14 ... the on-prem systems were. And so in a cloud world, it's, it is a reinvention of the user experience-

Martin Casado 10:20 Yeah

Aaron Levie 10:20 ... and what, what you're doing in the system, and we should, you know, definitely get to that.

Martin Casado 10:23 Well, well, I-

Aaron Levie 10:23 Yeah

Martin Casado 10:23 ... I just, I wanna make sure I tease this out 'cause it's actually, uh, it's a very interesting point, which is so your claim is, is to go from pre-cloud to post-cloud, like that ripped through the entire stack all the way down to like the infrastructure, for example, like tenancy.

Aaron Levie 10:35 Yes.

Martin Casado 10:35 Like you have to rewrite everything, and then what you're saying about AI is more of a consumption layer thing, which is like you just kind of like treat the existing systems as they are-

Aaron Levie 10:43 Yeah

Martin Casado 10:43 ... and then, like, you know, the AI becomes the consumption layer.

Aaron Levie 10:45 Yep.

Martin Casado 10:46 Do you think this is like a 1.5 step, and like the 2.0 step-

Aaron Levie 10:50 Yeah

Martin Casado 10:50 ... kind of rips through the entire stack, or-

Aaron Levie 10:52 Well, okay, so, so let's, let's bookmark that one-

Martin Casado 10:53 Yeah

Aaron Levie 10:53 ... for one second.

Martin Casado 10:54 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 10:54 So, so but like if you, if you do pure Clay Christensen sort of, you know-

Martin Casado 10:58 Yeah

Aaron Levie 10:58 ... approach, you, you know, sustaining innovation, disruptive innovation.

Martin Casado 11:01 Yep.

Aaron Levie 11:01 Disruptive innovation is this thing that looks like so much harder, so different, so less profitable.

Martin Casado 11:05 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 11:05 Sustaining is like, actually, no, I'd like to build that because-

Martin Casado 11:08 Yeah, it's incremental. Yeah, sure

Aaron Levie 11:08 ... it's just like it's incremental.

Martin Casado 11:09 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 11:09 It, it's better for our business overall. The on-prem guys had a disruptive innovation.

Martin Casado 11:14 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 11:14 Everything about the, the business model of SaaS looked different-

Martin Casado 11:18 Yeah

Aaron Levie 11:18 ... harder, stranger. I, I don't have the talent. I, I'm running, I'm running a service delivery operation as opposed to-

Martin Casado 11:24 Yeah

Aaron Levie 11:24 ... I ship you, you know, a CD-ROM with my code.

Martin Casado 11:26 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 11:26 So-

Martin Casado 11:26 Everything about the finances and pricing model, like everything changes-

Aaron Levie 11:29 Yes, like everything, the business model, everything.

Martin Casado 11:30 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 11:30 AI, again, with the bookmark being the, like the really big disruption that you could contemplate. Right now with AI, everything kind of looks like a sustaining innovation if you're an incumbent, which is like instead of a user pressing the buttons in the application-

Martin Casado 11:43 Yeah

Aaron Levie 11:43 ... let's have an agent run through the API and operate as if they were that user.

Martin Casado 11:47 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 11:47 And so all of a sudden, for a lot of SaaS providers, this looks like a TAM expansion.

Martin Casado 11:51 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 11:52 Because now-

Martin Casado 11:52 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Aaron Levie 11:52 ... for the first time ever, I can actually deploy my software for use cases where the customer didn't have-

Martin Casado 11:57 Right

Aaron Levie 11:58 ... users on the other end before to do those things.

Martin Casado 12:00 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 12:00 So I think you have a lot of TAM expansion. Now, the good news for startups-

Martin Casado 12:02 With one, with one caveat-

Aaron Levie 12:03 Yeah. Right

Martin Casado 12:03 ... which may- maybe we've bookmarked, and we're gonna get to, but let me just say the one caveat.

Aaron Levie 12:06 Yeah.

Martin Casado 12:06 The one caveat is you now have a component that has a very different COGS model if you're a software provider.

Aaron Levie 12:13 Yes.

Martin Casado 12:13 And so like now it's almost like, it's almost like when we went from like on-prem to cloud-

Aaron Levie 12:17 Yeah

Martin Casado 12:17 ... we went from perpetual to recurring.

Aaron Levie 12:19 Yeah.

Martin Casado 12:19 And it feels like with AI, you kind of have to go from recurring to usage-based just because

Aaron Levie 12:26 Yeah. I, I, um... Okay. So, so business model will, will shift for some of the use cases.

Martin Casado 12:30 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 12:31 Because even if you look at the Cursors, Replitz, you know, Windsurfs of the world, there does seem to be this baseline seat price, and then, and then your consumption usage thing is sort of this add-on.

Martin Casado 12:40 This overage. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 12:41 And so, and so, you know, SaaS providers are kind of well, well-structured to be able to have that kind of dynamic.

Martin Casado 12:47 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 12:47 Um, if it was 100% usage and the, and the user seat goes away, I do agree then you have this... Then, then you have a, then you have a little bit of a business model crisis, which-

Martin Casado 12:55 Oh, so you think but right now it's not clear that that's gonna go all the way over?

Aaron Levie 12:58 Well, until you, until the human literally is not a seat on the system, I d- I think you don't remove the end user license as a component.

Martin Casado 13:06 Okay.

Aaron Levie 13:06 And, but again-

Martin Casado 13:07 Right

Aaron Levie 13:07 ... that, that could be, like, the much bigger disruption.

Martin Casado 13:09 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 13:09 Now, now, the, the, um... Just, just to, you know, f- fully lay out though the, the, the market dynamics, I think SaaS incumbents are es- especially, you, you have a couple other idiosyncrasies right now versus the on-prem days. Another idiosyncrasy is I would say, like, on the margin, you tend to have founders still leading the, the SaaS companies.

Martin Casado 13:26 100%. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 13:27 And so-

Martin Casado 13:27 Yeah, that's a great point

Aaron Levie 13:28 ... we, we didn't really have that in the on-prem world.

Martin Casado 13:30 Totally. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 13:30 And so you... Like, like Siebel already had three CEOs later, and PeopleSoft already had-

Martin Casado 13:34 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Aaron Levie 13:34 ... multiple CEOs later.

Martin Casado 13:35 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 13:35 So it was a different leadership structure in these organizations.

Martin Casado 13:38 Yeah, that's a-

Aaron Levie 13:39 A lot of the time you still have the founder around, they're poking around, they're really into AI, so, so there, there can be a in, a, a more natural pivot of the company from-

Martin Casado 13:45 Yeah

Aaron Levie 13:45 ... from the leadership standpoint.

Martin Casado 13:46 Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Aaron Levie 13:47 So bunch of different factors. Now, to the benefit of startups, which is why I'm actually... I can, I can hold both of these in my head, which is I'm, I'm very bullish on the SaaS incumbent being the natural place for that AI agent relative to that category.

Martin Casado 14:00 Sure.

Aaron Levie 14:01 I just think we have this incredible expansion of categories for the first time-

Martin Casado 14:04 Yeah

Aaron Levie 14:04 ... that we haven't seen in probably 15 years.

Martin Casado 14:06 Totally. Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 14:06 So the SaaS 1.0 wave actually... It, it actually expanded the software universe where we had these new categories of software that we didn't expect before. Like, nobody would've p- predicted the Confluents and the Snowflakes-

Martin Casado 14:19 Yeah

Aaron Levie 14:19 ... in, in, in the pre-on-prem days. We didn't have all of these different cuts of, of how do you work with data, how do you do this workflow, how do you do that line of... Like, lines of business didn't have s- 15 different applications they got to use.

Martin Casado 14:30 Yep. Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 14:30 Post-SaaS they did.

Martin Casado 14:31 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 14:32 So for startups in the AI world, the equivalent of that is I think there's a lot of, of categories now where there's no actually software incumbent in that category-

Martin Casado 14:42 Totally

Aaron Levie 14:42 ... where A- AI agents all of a sudden let you go build software for that category: legal, healthcare, education-

Martin Casado 14:48 Well, so-

Aaron Levie 14:48 ... and so on.

Martin Casado 14:48 So that's definitely true on the consumer side, right?

Aaron Levie 14:51 Yeah.

Martin Casado 14:51 If you look at the top use cases of OpenAI, it's almost like the top of the pyramid of needs, right?

Aaron Levie 14:54 Yep. Right.

Martin Casado 14:54 It's like creativity and fulfillment and, like, you know, et cetera. And, like, I think, like, number five is,

Martin Casado 15:00 like, professional coding.

Aaron Levie 15:01 Yeah.

Martin Casado 15:01 But everything above that is one of these. So on the consumer that's very clear.

Aaron Levie 15:04 Yep.

Martin Casado 15:04 Is that, is that clear on the enterprise side?

Aaron Levie 15:06 I, I, I absolutely think so. I think if you looked at... Just, just take, um... If we did a snapshot 10 years ago-

Martin Casado 15:12 Yeah

Aaron Levie 15:12 ... of the size of the, uh, contract management market or the legal document market-

Martin Casado 15:18 Okay

Aaron Levie 15:18 ... it's, like, sub two billion.

Martin Casado 15:19 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 15:19 I'm making up the numbers.

Martin Casado 15:20 Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure.

Aaron Levie 15:21 It could be plus or minus a billion.

Martin Casado 15:22 Yep, yep, yep.

Aaron Levie 15:23 Would you agree that in five years from now, the AI agent related spend on legal services should be in the many, many b- billions to double digit billions?

Martin Casado 15:32 Absolutely.

Aaron Levie 15:33 Okay.

Martin Casado 15:33 No question.

Aaron Levie 15:33 So all of a sudden there's, like, not these natural incumbents-

Martin Casado 15:36 Yeah, yeah

Aaron Levie 15:36 ... that were like, "Oh, we, we captured all that market."

Martin Casado 15:39 I see. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 15:39 AI agents all of a sudden expands the size-

Martin Casado 15:41 Yeah

Aaron Levie 15:41 ... of the software related spend in that space. So I can underwrite that for healthcare, legal, consulting services. I think there's e- entire areas of financial services. Like, we always think, "Oh, finance has been wired up for so many years." No. Banking, you know, like, con- you know, consumer banking has been wired up. Trading has been wired up. Investment banking never went digital.

Martin Casado 16:01 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 16:01 Wealth management never went digital.

Martin Casado 16:02 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 16:03 Like, these were not categories where, where you ever had, like, major software platforms to help these entire categories of the economy. And, and the reason was because the work was unstructured. It's very ad hoc, very dynamic, lots of unstructured data as opposed to stuff that goes into databases. All of that is now ripe for AI, and that will then largely be ripe for many startups because there won't be a natural incumbent in those spaces.

Martin Casado 16:26 I mean, it's so strange to me how many disruptions are happening all at the same time-

Aaron Levie 16:30 Mm-hmm

Martin Casado 16:30 ... with AI, right? I mean, like, if you think about it, like, everything you said, which is basically vertical SaaS or vertical use cases, which a lot of that is actually human budget, right?

Aaron Levie 16:36 Yep.

Martin Casado 16:36 That's been disrupted. There's a bunch of new use cases that we never really thought about before, which is, like, the creativity and, you know.

Aaron Levie 16:42 Right.

Martin Casado 16:42 I mean, who would've thought that 2D image would be some massive market?

Aaron Levie 16:44 Yes.

Martin Casado 16:45 But it's a massive market-

Aaron Levie 16:45 Yep

Martin Casado 16:46 ... right, it turns out. [laughs] Um, you know, I've, listen, I've been a programmer for 30 years, right? And in that time, like, software would disrupt other things.

Aaron Levie 16:54 Yep.

Martin Casado 16:55 Like, we'd disrupt all of these things, but we never got disrupted.

Aaron Levie 16:57 Right.

Martin Casado 16:57 But, like, clearly, [laughs] like-

Aaron Levie 16:58 We're safe. We're screwing you guys instead. [laughs]

Martin Casado 17:00 But clearly now software is being disrupted, right?

Aaron Levie 17:02 Yeah.

Martin Casado 17:02 For the first time, like, I've ever seen in 30 years.

Aaron Levie 17:05 Yep.

Martin Casado 17:05 And so, like, do you think this level of disruption is something that existing companies will n- ... Like, may- maybe a more fine point, you are a business leader right now. You have to think about product and you have to think about your organization. Does it require you to have to think about too much? Like, how do you structure your company as well how do you structure your product? Or do you think, like, this is actually all pretty manageable?

Aaron Levie 17:25 Um, I, uh-

Martin Casado 17:27 [laughs] Like your R&D pro-

Aaron Levie 17:28 Yeah.

Martin Casado 17:28 Literally, like, I'm putting myself in your shoes, right?

Aaron Levie 17:31 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Martin Casado 17:31 Which is, like, you're CEO. Like, your R&D is changing.

Aaron Levie 17:33 Yep.

Martin Casado 17:34 [laughs] You're like-

Aaron Levie 17:35 Every service stack is changing

Martin Casado 17:36 ... like everything.

Aaron Levie 17:36 Yeah. Yeah. I, uh, I think the reason that... I'm probably frankly more distracted by what we're building that I don't have enough time to stress out about the actual organizational side.

Martin Casado 17:47 Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 17:47 Because I'm stressed out enough about-

Martin Casado 17:48 [laughs]

Aaron Levie 17:48 ... just literally, like, the actual pure, like, delivery of the product.

Martin Casado 17:51 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 17:51 I think if I had a little bit more time, I'd get more stressed out-

Martin Casado 17:53 Yeah, yeah

Aaron Levie 17:53 ... um, about all the other change. Um, we, we are very much leaning into the idea of being AI first.

Martin Casado 17:59 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 17:59 Um, we, we, you know, we have a twofer on this. Like, one, by being as AI first as possible, we'll see the use cases that our product should go solve for customers.

Martin Casado 18:07 Mm-hmm.

Aaron Levie 18:07 So, like, check that box.

Martin Casado 18:08 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 18:08 And then second is, like, I'm just a believer of the efficiency-

Martin Casado 18:11 Yeah

Aaron Levie 18:11 ... productivity gains.

Martin Casado 18:11 Yeah. Yeah, sure.

Aaron Levie 18:12 Um, and I do think it does change basically everything about, you know, work.

Martin Casado 18:16 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 18:16 A- and, and there's lots of these interesting examples of what it means. Like, so in the future, does the individual contributor basically become a manager of agents?

Martin Casado 18:24 Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 18:24 So that's a totally-

Martin Casado 18:25 Right

Aaron Levie 18:25 ... different job.

Martin Casado 18:26 Right.

Aaron Levie 18:26 Right?

Martin Casado 18:26 Totally. Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 18:27 Like, like that... Like, the, my, my recent kinda go-to is just thinking about it as, like, a lot of the productivity or organiz- of your organization was rate limited by just, like, literally, like, how fast can somebody use a computer to do something?

Martin Casado 18:39 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 18:39 To type an email.

Martin Casado 18:40 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 18:40 To write code.

Martin Casado 18:41 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 18:41 To generate a marketing asset.

Martin Casado 18:42 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 18:42 When that's no longer a limiter-

Martin Casado 18:44 Yeah

Aaron Levie 18:44 ... how do these jobs begin to change? And it's like, okay, your job is now orchestration, you know, integration of work, planning, task management, reviewing, auditing.

Martin Casado 18:54 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 18:54 And, and that will, you know, that will radically change work. Interestingly, there's pro- it probably behooves us to not over-rotate on transforming yet internally-

Martin Casado 19:02 Yeah

Aaron Levie 19:02 ... for any given company, simply because the technology's changing so fast.

Martin Casado 19:06 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 19:06 That, like, you probably wouldn't want to snap the line right now, run your whole business on this technology, because in two years from now it's gonna be so much better.

Martin Casado 19:15 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 19:15 And so I think progressively figuring out which workflows have high impact upside-

Martin Casado 19:20 Yeah

Aaron Levie 19:20 ... getting it rolled out in a decentralized way so people can experiment. Like, I think you'd wanna do a few of

Aaron Levie 19:25 those type of things first.

Martin Casado 19:26 Just, I mean, I can't imagine a, a listener n-not knowing what Box does, but just for completeness, maybe can you just talk to us very quickly about what Doc- Box does-

Aaron Levie 19:34 Yeah

Martin Casado 19:34 ... and how you're thinking about how that dovetails with AI?

Aaron Levie 19:37 Yeah, so, um, we started the company on a really s- with a really simple premise, make it easy to access and share your files from anywhere. And we, we pivoted about two years in to, to the journey to focus on the enterprise market, and the whole idea was enterprises are awash with all this in, you know, unstructured data, so corporate documents, research files, marketing assets, uh, M&A documents, contracts, invoices, all of this. And as companies move to the cloud and as they move to mobile, they need a way to access that information. They need a way to collaborate securely on it.

Martin Casado 20:07 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 20:07 Um, they wanna be able to integrate that data across different systems, so we built a platform to help, to help companies do that. We have about 120,000 customers, about 65 or so percent of the Fortune 500. And so what's incredible right now is we've had this ongoing problem since the creation of the company, which is with structured data, the stuff that goes into your database-

Martin Casado 20:27 Yep, yep

Aaron Levie 20:27 ... you can query it, you can synthesize it, you can calculate it-

Martin Casado 20:29 Yep

Aaron Levie 20:29 ... you can analyze it.

Martin Casado 20:30 Yep.

Aaron Levie 20:31 Your unstructured data, the stuff that we manage-

Martin Casado 20:33 Yep

Aaron Levie 20:33 ... you create it, you share it, you look at it, and then you basically kinda gets forgotten about. Like, it goes into some folder, and you almost never see it again. And, and maybe you kinda find it once every five years for some task you're doing, but that's about it. And so most companies are sitting on most of their data being unstructured-

Martin Casado 20:49 Mm-hmm

Aaron Levie 20:50 ... and getting the least amount of value from it relative to their other, you know, structured data.

Martin Casado 20:55 Yep.

Aaron Levie 20:56 AI is basically the unlock. So AI lets you finally say, "Okay, we can ask this data questions."

Martin Casado 21:01 Oh, cool. That's cool.

Aaron Levie 21:02 "We can structure it, so we can take, we can look at a contract, pull out the 10 most important fields. Once we have all that data, we can analyze that information, we can get in-insights from it." And then you can start to do things like workflow automation that was never possible with your unstructured data. So if I wanna move a contract through an automatic process, I can't do it if I don't know what's in the contract, and the computer previously was not able to know-

Martin Casado 21:24 Yeah

Aaron Levie 21:24 ... what's in the contract. So for us, this is a huge unlock of now what you can finally do with your information and your content, so we're building an AI platform to handle all of the kinda plumbing, user experience, uh, to make then your content AI-ready effectively.

Martin Casado 21:39 I don't wanna be, like, too bullshitty and-

Aaron Levie 21:40 Sure

Martin Casado 21:40 ... provocative, but I have to, I have to ask this, which is-

Aaron Levie 21:43 Please

Martin Casado 21:44 ... um, I've been in enterprise software for a very long time.

Aaron Levie 21:46 Yes.

Martin Casado 21:46 A lot of the business model is predicated on the fact that, like, building software is hard and takes a long time.

Aaron Levie 21:51 Yep.

Martin Casado 21:52 Like, to what extent do you worry about that not being the truth going forward? Like, do you think we enter, like, this time of bespoke software being upon us?

Aaron Levie 22:01 Um, I'm, I'm, I'm bearish on the, on the, uh, extreme version of that, um, uh, of the essence of that. So the extreme version of that, if you just im- you know, if you imagine the poles of this, like, the extreme... Like, like, you know, on one pole, basically all software is prepackaged. It, you know, it's the Ford Model T. It's gonna work v- the only in one way.

Martin Casado 22:22 Yep, yep.

Aaron Levie 22:22 Everybody uses the same thing.

Martin Casado 22:23 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 22:23 Okay, like, that's not gonna happen. We, we get that.

Martin Casado 22:25 No. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 22:25 The other extreme is, like, everything is just, like, home brew.

Martin Casado 22:28 You wake up in the morning, you utter something-

Aaron Levie 22:30 Yeah

Martin Casado 22:30 ... you get your software for the day. [laughs]

Aaron Levie 22:31 You get your software for that thing, and then, like, the next day you do it again and you change it.

Martin Casado 22:34 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 22:34 Okay.

Martin Casado 22:35 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 22:35 The, the downsides of that model, of why basically I think it doesn't work, is I think if you ask, like, 90%... Uh, if you ask, uh, the world population, uh, you know, you'd probably find that 90-plus percent just don't care enough. They just don't, like, they don't care about-

Martin Casado 22:48 [laughs] That's true

Aaron Levie 22:48 ... about the tabs on their software-

Martin Casado 22:50 Right, right, right, right, right

Aaron Levie 22:50 ... and the modules on their dashboard.

Martin Casado 22:52 Right, right, right.

Aaron Levie 22:52 They d- Like, it's like they want someone else to just be like, "This is what you should look at in the morning."

Martin Casado 22:56 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 22:56 They don't wanna have to even prompt the AI to tell them what to look at.

Martin Casado 22:59 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 23:00 So given that that's basically guaranteed to be where 90% of the world, no matter what you, no matter how you cut anything-

Martin Casado 23:05 Yeah, yeah, that's a great point

Aaron Levie 23:06 ... that means that basically 90% of our software should largely be like, okay, you log into the HR system, and it just, like, looks like an HR system. And in, in fact, you know, there's another interesting dynamic, which is, like, over many, many years, our software and our actual way that we operate companies have kind of, like... There, there's this, there's this flywheel relationship between them. And so, like, the way we run our HR department is-

Martin Casado 23:28 Yeah

Aaron Levie 23:28 ... like, not so different than the way Workday wants us to run our HR department.

Martin Casado 23:33 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 23:33 And it's, like, fine-

Martin Casado 23:34 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure

Aaron Levie 23:34 ... because, like, that-that's not the area that we're gonna have a lot of upside innovating on.

Martin Casado 23:37 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 23:37 And so, and, like, the way that we do our ticket management from customer tickets is, like, the way that Zendesk, like, decided to do ticket management.

Martin Casado 23:45 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 23:45 And, like, and that's fine because, like, the, that's not the core IP of the company.

Martin Casado 23:49 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 23:49 And so I think most comp-

Martin Casado 23:50 In, in a, in a way it solves an operational problem for you, right?

Aaron Levie 23:53 Yes, exactly.

Martin Casado 23:53 Like, you don't have, you don't have to figure it out.

Aaron Levie 23:54 Right.

Martin Casado 23:54 Like, you have to figure it out for anybody.

Aaron Levie 23:54 No, and, uh, people miss that about software.

Martin Casado 23:56 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 23:56 It's like I don't wanna have to think-

Martin Casado 23:57 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Aaron Levie 23:57 ... about the workflow-

Martin Casado 23:59 Right, right

Aaron Levie 23:59 ... of an HR payroll process.

Martin Casado 24:00 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 24:00 Like, I just want the, I just want the software to do that.

Martin Casado 24:03 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 24:04 And so that's what people are buying, and so nobody wants to customize those things.

Martin Casado 24:07 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 24:08 Now, again, given that we're gonna be in this world of many different outcomes playing out, the reason I'm still bullish on Replit and vibe coding is for a different category, which is, like, I'm the IT person.

Martin Casado 24:19 Mm-hmm.

Aaron Levie 24:20 And I just, like, have this crazy queue of tasks, and then someone's like, "Can you build a website for this thing? And can you, like, code up some in-inventory rand-random plugin for this product?" It's like that now becomes 10 times easier.

Martin Casado 24:32 So the new prototyping, scripting-

Aaron Levie 24:33 Yeah

Martin Casado 24:33 ... kind of like the long tail of stuff that we wanted to do.

Aaron Levie 24:35 And that long tail is so long-

Martin Casado 24:37 Yeah

Aaron Levie 24:37 ... and people never get to any of those things in that long tail.

Martin Casado 24:39 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 24:39 And so I could underwrite a 10X growth of the amount of custom software that gets written-

Martin Casado 24:45 Right

Aaron Levie 24:45 ... and the fact that these core systems don't go away.

Martin Casado 24:48 Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 24:48 Because there's just actually gonna be way more software in the world that gets created.

Martin Casado 24:51 Let me pressure test this. So, like, okay, so I, I could imagine why it would be hard to rebuild Box because, like, what you do is actually hard. Like, this is core infrastructure. You store data. Like, that's really important, and so, like, I don't think you just vibe code that away. But from my perspective, a lot of SaaS apps just look like CRUD [laughs] to me.

Aaron Levie 25:07 [laughs]

Martin Casado 25:07 Like, CRUD is, I don't know what the acronym stands for, but it's basically you're reading and writing data from, like-

Aaron Levie 25:11 Yep

Martin Casado 25:11 ... a backend. And so do you think that there is a world where the consumption layer evolves to just using AI, and this class of companies go away? Or do you actually think, if I heard what you just said, that the durability of these companies is it, it basically teaches you what the workflow is?

Aaron Levie 25:26 Well, I'm still gonna say the latter.

Martin Casado 25:27 Okay.

Aaron Levie 25:27 Um, uh, now, I don't know if, if you need to bleep it out, but if you wanna share a couple examples of who you put in the not hard CRUD layer-

Martin Casado 25:35 Yeah

Aaron Levie 25:35 ... then, then we could, like, parse that. But, but up to you

Martin Casado 25:39 The not hard crud layer?

Aaron Levie 25:40 Yeah

Martin Casado 25:41 I mean, I would say most vertical SaaS companies I see, the technology's trivial.

Aaron Levie 25:47 Yeah, but, but the understanding of the domain is not.

Martin Casado 25:49 No, no, this is what you said before.

Aaron Levie 25:50 Yeah.

Martin Casado 25:50 So this, this is what I wanna press the thing.

Aaron Levie 25:51 That's the thing, is like, it's like, I think-

Martin Casado 25:52 That's actually, that's actually a great insight. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 25:54 I, like, I, I, um, I've always-

Martin Casado 25:57 I like that. Yeah

Aaron Levie 25:57 ... I've always been, I've always underestimated vertical SaaS-

Martin Casado 26:00 Yeah

Aaron Levie 26:00 ... relative to the outcome.

Martin Casado 26:01 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 26:01 And like, uh, like, 20 years into doing enterprise software, I'm just, like, no longer gonna underestimate vertical SaaS. Like, like, like-

Martin Casado 26:07 Yeah. It's, it's, it's not about the technology, it's the fact that somebody else has figured out the business-

Aaron Levie 26:09 Yeah

Martin Casado 26:09 ... model that works, and like-

Aaron Levie 26:11 Like, they have, like, 10 people from-

Martin Casado 26:12 But what is the workflow? What is the first-

Aaron Levie 26:13 ... from the pharma industry-

Martin Casado 26:14 Yeah, that's great

Aaron Levie 26:14 ... that is, like, sitting next to the engineer being like, "This is how you should do the clinical trial, you know, workflow."

Martin Casado 26:19 Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 26:19 And that becomes so much of the IP. Now, that translates fine to agents, but I still would then bet on-

Martin Casado 26:25 Yeah

Aaron Levie 26:25 ... that pl- that vertical player doing that, as opposed to somebody who prompts their way into ChatGPT to build a FDA compliance agent. I would, I would still largely bet on, you know, complianceagent.ai to do that over, over the pure horizontal system that has no particular domain, you know, kind of expertise for that. Um, and then I think the other thing on the, you know, y- you, you also... I still think that there's a, a relationship between some amount of GUI and the agent and the APIs.

Martin Casado 26:53 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 26:53 Because, again, like, you don't wanna every day of your life go to an, a, a blank, empty screen and say, "What's our revenue today?"

Martin Casado 27:00 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 27:00 Like, you just want a dashboard at some point-

Martin Casado 27:01 [laughs]

Aaron Levie 27:01 ... that just, like, shows you the revenue.

Martin Casado 27:02 That's right. Of course, like [laughs]

Aaron Levie 27:03 Like, and so then, then-

Martin Casado 27:04 It's almost like cast queries in a way.

Aaron Levie 27:06 Yeah.

Martin Casado 27:06 Like, like, some- somebody has made the decision-

Aaron Levie 27:08 Yes

Martin Casado 27:08 ... of like what's important, right?

Aaron Levie 27:08 Like, this is like a known way to-

Martin Casado 27:09 Yeah

Aaron Levie 27:09 ... to like-

Martin Casado 27:10 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Aaron Levie 27:10 ... solve this problem in the enterprise.

Martin Casado 27:12 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 27:12 And so I think that's why the, the, the theory of, like, the full abstraction away-

Martin Casado 27:16 Yeah

Aaron Levie 27:16 ... from, from the interface and it's all an API call, I don't think that happens. And, and so ironically, probably what will happen is in a couple years from now, we will see agents, like, rebuild entire webpages and dashboards, and then we're gonna find ourselves like, "Wait, why are we having an ag- why do I have to spend tokens-

Martin Casado 27:33 Yeah, right

Aaron Levie 27:33 ... to create a thing that is-

Martin Casado 27:35 Right, right, right, right

Aaron Levie 27:35 ... a config-

Martin Casado 27:35 Right, right

Aaron Levie 27:35 ... on a, on a dashboard?

Martin Casado 27:36 Yeah, right.

Aaron Levie 27:36 And like, we'll just be back to where we started-

Martin Casado 27:39 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Aaron Levie 27:39 ... for some amount of software, which will mean

Aaron Levie 27:41 that basically, like, these things are gonna live together.

Martin Casado 27:44 Cool. Let's move from software to decision process. So, uh, I won't say the name of the company, but I, I just spoke with a very, very legit company, household name-

Aaron Levie 27:53 [laughs]

Martin Casado 27:53 ... where, uh, it's a private company though, it's not a public company, where at the board level, for every decision they ask the AI [laughs] for like, like, a basically a more information for the decision.

Aaron Levie 28:05 Okay.

Martin Casado 28:05 Right? And they were like, "This has actually been great-

Aaron Levie 28:07 Yeah

Martin Casado 28:07 ... from like-

Aaron Levie 28:08 That's funny

Martin Casado 28:08 ... from like discussion fodder-

Aaron Levie 28:10 Yeah

Martin Casado 28:11 ... to be provocative."

Aaron Levie 28:12 Yeah.

Martin Casado 28:12 And it also shows how, like, fundamentally unoriginal [laughs] the board members are.

Aaron Levie 28:17 Yeah.

Martin Casado 28:17 Like, this founder was telling me, he's like, "It's literally better than half of my board members," right? And so [laughs] like, how much have you thought about bringing AIs in to like help with decision process?

Aaron Levie 28:27 Yeah.

Martin Casado 28:28 And by the way, I think the board is like low-hanging fruit, because boards tend to not have a lot of context to the business, and so kind of like the instance are probably less anyways. But is this something that you've thought about, or...?

Aaron Levie 28:40 Um, well, no, uh, the, the board one is an interesting one, so maybe we can, we can, uh, unravel that one. But the, um... Well, like, I already use it for, let's say, our earnings calls, where we'll do a draft of the initial, uh, earnings script.

Martin Casado 28:52 Okay.

Aaron Levie 28:52 And then, I mean, again, because Box AI deals with unstructured data-

Martin Casado 28:56 Yeah

Aaron Levie 28:56 ... I just load up the earnings script, and I'll use a, a better model and say, like, "Give me 10 talk... Give me 10 points that analysts are gonna ask about this, and like, how would I improve the script?" And it just spits out a bunch of things, and it's-

Martin Casado 29:07 And how, how good is it at predicting what analysts are gonna ask?

Aaron Levie 29:08 Oh, extremely good. Oh, 100%.

Martin Casado 29:10 We're so-

Aaron Levie 29:10 Because, because, but the, but the thing is like that's not surprising. Like-

Martin Casado 29:13 Yeah

Aaron Levie 29:14 ... like, it has access-

Martin Casado 29:15 No, of course

Aaron Levie 29:15 ... to every public earnings call in history.

Martin Casado 29:18 Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 29:18 So, and like, at the end of the day, analysts can only ask you, like-

Martin Casado 29:21 Yeah

Aaron Levie 29:21 ... "Tailwinds, headwinds. What, who's buying what?" It's not because the analysts are smart or not smart, it's just like those are the things that, like, you would try and deduce from an earnings call-

Martin Casado 29:30 And, and you-

Aaron Levie 29:30 ... buying a stock

Martin Casado 29:30 ... and you wouldn't have thought of these questions beforehand, or is it just like a-

Aaron Levie 29:33 I think at your, you're doing-

Martin Casado 29:34 ... just on the margin-

Aaron Levie 29:35 Yeah

Martin Casado 29:35 ... on the margin it's useful.

Aaron Levie 29:35 No, no. So, so, so, sorry. So, so what I'm using is, is then s- the specific parts of the document that is missing-

Martin Casado 29:42 Ah

Aaron Levie 29:42 ... the answers to those questions.

Martin Casado 29:43 That's it. Okay.

Aaron Levie 29:43 So I can actually inject the answers into that.

Martin Casado 29:45 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, cool.

Aaron Levie 29:46 And so, and so like, you add... And so then, 'cause like, you know, you're typing out a thing and like, "Oh, okay, I forgot to give two case studies in this section," or

Aaron Levie 29:53 whatever.

Martin Casado 29:53 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 29:53 So it's a, it's a quick way to just do, do some analysis on something. The, um, but yeah, I mean, you know, it's, it's funny, we, we, uh, uh, so Bezos, you know, famously had this me- memo-oriented-

Martin Casado 30:03 Yeah

Aaron Levie 30:03 ... essay-oriented-

Martin Casado 30:04 Yeah

Aaron Levie 30:04 ... kind of meeting structure, and, um, w- we never did that, but I was always fascinated by the companies that, that could do it. And actually we're, we're entering a world where probably you could just pull that off, right? So if, imagine if, whether it's a board meeting or product meeting, you just do a quick deep research essay on the topic. Like, obviously every meeting, every strategy meeting in, uh, in history would be better off if you probably had that as a starting asset-

Martin Casado 30:25 Yeah

Aaron Levie 30:25 ... to get everybody informed.

Martin Casado 30:26 No, the, the, um, the, I think the argument against that would be the reason Bezos said it is because it forced people to think clearly about what they're doing-

Aaron Levie 30:33 Yeah

Martin Casado 30:33 ... and writing it down. So the exercise meant the people walking in the meeting had more context.

Aaron Levie 30:37 Yeah.

Martin Casado 30:37 This would almost argue that they would have less context because something else did the thinking.

Aaron Levie 30:40 Well, well, two things. The, the, the, it was, uh, it was to make sure that the person doing the thing had the clarity to write it.

Martin Casado 30:47 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 30:47 For sure.

Martin Casado 30:47 Exactly.

Aaron Levie 30:47 But it was also still to inform everybody else that could, that didn't do that work.

Martin Casado 30:51 Right. True.

Aaron Levie 30:51 And so it certainly would've helped everybody else in the room.

Martin Casado 30:54 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 30:54 And I'm not 100%. I mean, we should do a full longitudinal analysis of like the people that wrote the essay, did they actually have the better products?

Martin Casado 31:01 They were-

Aaron Levie 31:01 Or like, like, I mean, there's

Aaron Levie 31:03 some Amazon products I don't like, and so d- they obviously wrote an essay also for those.

Martin Casado 31:06 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 31:07 So I, you know, I don't know the hit rate ultimately on the essay specifically-

Martin Casado 31:10 Yeah

Aaron Levie 31:10 ... as much as the idea of like write down a strategy, think it through, and so why not have an agent do like 90% of the heavy lifting?

Martin Casado 31:17 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 31:17 So a lot of my, my workflows are, like, if I have a topic where, like, like, maybe the direct change of, of my workflow on this front is, is the kind of thing that three years ago I might sort of lob over to the chief of staff and say, "Hey, can you, like, go rese- research like the pricing strategy-

Martin Casado 31:34 Yeah

Aaron Levie 31:34 ... of this ecosystem or something?"

Martin Casado 31:36 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 31:36 That's just a deep research query now.

Martin Casado 31:38 Oh, yeah.

Aaron Levie 31:38 And then I'll wake up and-

Martin Casado 31:39 Sure. Yeah

Aaron Levie 31:39 ... and it'll look at this thing.

Martin Casado 31:40 For sure.

Aaron Levie 31:40 And so the, but what that does is because now I'm not having to calculate that person's time, their tasks, their trade-offs.

Martin Casado 31:47 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 31:48 I just do it for the most random things.

Martin Casado 31:50 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 31:50 Which means, like, I'm expanding and exploring way more spaces mentally than I would've before.

Martin Casado 31:56 Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 31:56 And these are the kind of, you know, parts where like, like... And, and, and again, this is equally why I'm like actually more optimistic on the jobs front-

Martin Casado 32:03 Yeah

Aaron Levie 32:03 ... because what we, we, we do too many times within AI is we, like, look at today's way of working, and we're just like, "AI will come in and take 30% of that." And it's like, no, no, no. A-

Martin Casado 32:11 Yeah

Aaron Levie 32:11 ... we'll just do totally different things with AI.

Martin Casado 32:13 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 32:13 I wouldn't have researched that thing before when it was people required to research it-

Martin Casado 32:17 Yeah

Aaron Levie 32:17 ... 'cause that would've been

Aaron Levie 32:18 an inane, you know, task to send to somebody.

Martin Casado 32:20 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So o- one thing, so when we run the numbersAnd by run the numbers, I mean look through how AI companies are doing, where does the value accrue. There's basically one takeaway.

Aaron Levie 32:32 [laughs]

Martin Casado 32:32 And that is, like these markets are very large-

Aaron Levie 32:34 Yeah

Martin Casado 32:34 ... and growing very fast. And value is kind of accruing at every layer.

Aaron Levie 32:38 Yeah.

Martin Casado 32:38 Everything from like literally chips up to apps, right?

Aaron Levie 32:41 Yeah.

Martin Casado 32:41 Everybody, you know. And so, like the only real sin is zero-sum thinking.

Aaron Levie 32:45 Yeah.

Martin Casado 32:45 To be like, "Oh, like the models are not gonna be defensible," or, or whatever the, your zero-sum thinking is, that just hasn't proven out.

Aaron Levie 32:50 Yep.

Martin Casado 32:51 Now, this has still largely been a consumer phenomenon, so like what, what I've been thinking about, and I don't, I don't have an answer. I'd love to hear your thought is, is when it comes to enterprise budgets, like you can't just create budget out of thin air.

Aaron Levie 33:03 Mm.

Martin Casado 33:03 So, like you actually do have a limited resource. And so as budgets get reallocated, to what extent do you think this is like zero sum, like the old budget gets robbed versus like budget accretive? Or like how do you think-

Aaron Levie 33:14 Yeah

Martin Casado 33:15 ... about that? Because again, like where we've come from, that has not been an issue.

Aaron Levie 33:18 Yeah.

Martin Casado 33:18 I think in the enterprise it probably will be.

Aaron Levie 33:20 So it does have to come from somewhere. It's fu- fully, fully logical. Um, couple things.

Martin Casado 33:24 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 33:25 A large number for startups can also be a very small number for a large corporation.

Martin Casado 33:29 Yeah, of course.

Aaron Levie 33:30 Uh, so, so you have that dynamic playing out.

Martin Casado 33:32 Sure.

Aaron Levie 33:32 Um, uh, like I, I'll, I'll make up random stats, but you could probably take a meaningful engineering team and s- and probably for the price of five of those engineers or 10 of those engineers, you could probably pay for Cursor licenses for the entire engineering team.

Martin Casado 33:45 Right.

Aaron Levie 33:46 And so-

Martin Casado 33:46 But this would argue that it's actually coming out of headcount.

Aaron Levie 33:51 Uh, so here's where the, here's where the, um, uh, asterisk is.

Martin Casado 33:55 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 33:55 There's in infinite ways, an infinite set of ways. This is why like you can never take a point in time snapshot on these kind of things.

Martin Casado 34:01 Yeah, totally.

Aaron Levie 34:01 There's an infinite set of ways that this actually plays out.

Martin Casado 34:03 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 34:03 Next year's planning process-

Martin Casado 34:05 Yeah

Aaron Levie 34:05 ... maybe i- in a, in a perfectly A to A, A, you know, like, like parallel universe, the, um, uh, salary increase that year would've been 3.5%-

Martin Casado 34:15 Yeah

Aaron Levie 34:16 ... for employees.

Martin Casado 34:16 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 34:16 And this coming year it's 3%-

Martin Casado 34:18 Yeah

Aaron Levie 34:18 ... 'cause we're gonna take .5%-

Martin Casado 34:19 Yeah

Aaron Levie 34:19 ... and we're gonna deploy AI, you know, for the company. Like there are so... Or maybe next year we're not gonna add, you know, we would've added 50 engineers, but we're gonna add 25 and then pay for AI. But guess what? The year after those, we're gonna have engineering productivity gains.

Martin Casado 34:34 So the-

Aaron Levie 34:35 So we'll-

Martin Casado 34:35 ... increases 'cause it's still a competitive environment, so like, yeah

Aaron Levie 34:37 We then now add engineers-

Martin Casado 34:39 Yeah

Aaron Levie 34:39 ... the year later-

Martin Casado 34:39 Yeah

Aaron Levie 34:40 ... because we're getting higher productivity gains.

Martin Casado 34:41 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 34:42 I, I think that, that, that most companies of any reasonable scale post 100 employees, let's say-

Martin Casado 34:47 Yeah

Aaron Levie 34:47 ... have, have enough sort of dynamism in the, in the financial model within a one to two-year period-

Martin Casado 34:52 This is so interesting

Aaron Levie 34:53 ... where, where it doesn't look like what the economists would think it looks like.

Martin Casado 34:56 So sorry, can I, can I-

Aaron Levie 34:57 Yeah

Martin Casado 34:57 ... just spit this back?

Aaron Levie 34:57 Yeah.

Martin Casado 34:57 'Cause I think this is actually [laughs] a very good point-

Aaron Levie 34:59 Yeah

Martin Casado 34:59 ... that's, that's buried in there. Just wanna make sure I'm following along, which is like the software license cost to a startup relative to like a large people organization is relatively small. It's just a couple of headcount.

Aaron Levie 35:11 Yeah.

Martin Casado 35:11 Which if you just look like normal performance management, normal attrition, normal like variability and, and, and even like hiring timelines-

Aaron Levie 35:18 Yeah

Martin Casado 35:18 ... is kind of in the noise.

Aaron Levie 35:19 Yeah.

Martin Casado 35:20 And so like, you know, you already have an annual budgeting cycle to fix that up.

Aaron Levie 35:24 Yes.

Martin Casado 35:24 And so like basically within the noise even of just like headcount planning-

Aaron Levie 35:27 Yeah

Martin Casado 35:28 ... all this could work out without like some massive disruption

Aaron Levie 35:30 To- totally. And I think that-

Martin Casado 35:31 That's such a cool point

Aaron Levie 35:31 ... and there could be an upper limit at this point.

Martin Casado 35:33 I love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 35:34 But like let's just, okay, let's say, let's say the going rate in Silicon Valley of a new engineer coming out of college, let's just say it's somewhere between 125 and 200.

Martin Casado 35:43 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 35:43 Okay? I'm just making up, okay?

Martin Casado 35:44 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 35:45 Let's say your, let's say your most aggressive Cursor usage or something is like 1,000 bucks a year, 2,000 bucks a year.

Martin Casado 35:51 Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 35:51 So you're at like 1% salary maybe.

Martin Casado 35:53 Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Aaron Levie 35:53 Um, and that is just not, that's just like, like here's the question. Now, now like, again, do this like crazy, you know, apples to o- apples thing. If you, if you went and recruited from Stanford right now-

Martin Casado 36:04 Yeah

Aaron Levie 36:04 ... and you said, "Okay, you Stanford grad have a choice. You can work at this company and get paid 125K."

Martin Casado 36:10 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 36:10 "Or you can, uh, uh, with no AI."

Martin Casado 36:12 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 36:12 "Or you can get paid 123K-"

Martin Casado 36:14 Yeah

Aaron Levie 36:14 "... with full access to AI."

Martin Casado 36:16 Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 36:16 "Which one are you gonna do?"

Martin Casado 36:17 Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 36:17 Yeah, they would do the 123 all day long.

Martin Casado 36:19 Yeah, yeah. But even-

Aaron Levie 36:20 And-

Martin Casado 36:20 But even that you're just, yeah, I mean, like your argument is, which makes a lot of sense to me, it's kind of on the margin when it comes-

Aaron Levie 36:24 Yeah

Martin Casado 36:24 ... to like total headcount.

Aaron Levie 36:25 But, but just as a way of exploring-

Martin Casado 36:26 Yeah

Aaron Levie 36:26 ... like why these things are not-

Martin Casado 36:28 Yeah, yeah

Aaron Levie 36:28 ... the, the high order bit of-

Martin Casado 36:30 Right

Aaron Levie 36:30 ... of the cost increase on budgets.

Martin Casado 36:31 Oh, I love that. That's great.

Aaron Levie 36:32 And like if you... I, I did, uh, I did one kinda late night sort of like modeling once. Uh, and it's like I'm, but I'm, I'm, I'm afraid to say all the numbers here 'cause I think they're just gonna be so wrong, but something on the order of like 5 or 6 trillion in knowledge worker headcount spend in the US.

Martin Casado 36:47 Yeah. Everybody says for developers-

Aaron Levie 36:48 Yeah

Martin Casado 36:48 ... they say, they say 40 million. Let's just say it's 30 million.

Aaron Levie 36:50 Yeah.

Martin Casado 36:51 Let's say that the average is 100K a year, you're at 3 trillion.

Aaron Levie 36:53 Yeah. Yeah.

Martin Casado 36:53 Man, these are just massive, massive numbers, so it's many trillion.

Aaron Levie 36:56 Yeah.

Martin Casado 36:56 Crazy.

Aaron Levie 36:56 So, so you have many trillions of dollars. If you take a couple percent of that or 5% of that, you're already doubling the entire sort of US enterprise software spend.

Martin Casado 37:04 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 37:05 So-

Martin Casado 37:05 Yeah. Yeah

Aaron Levie 37:05 ... so that is like, you can just make it work within... And this is why I don't think people... People will not make cuts because they have to pay for AI.

Martin Casado 37:12 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 37:13 They might make cuts for other reasons.

Martin Casado 37:14 Sure.

Aaron Levie 37:14 But even in those cases-

Martin Casado 37:16 Right

Aaron Levie 37:16 ... I think you'll often have it be for myopic reasons temporarily.

Martin Casado 37:19 Yeah. And there's enough flexibility to basically consume this-

Aaron Levie 37:22 Yeah

Martin Casado 37:22 ... and then actually like recap on the productivity gains.

Aaron Levie 37:24 Yep.

Martin Casado 37:24 I think that's great.

Aaron Levie 37:25 You, um-

Martin Casado 37:26 Yeah

Aaron Levie 37:26 ... you're, uh, like I, I, I try and parse everything you say through, through the lens of like where are you landing on like, on, you know, AI coding, and you seem to have a very pragmatic view of where things actually are at.

Martin Casado 37:40 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 37:41 Where, where, where are you landing right now?

Martin Casado 37:44 Well, it's been an evolv- so I would say in the entire AI thing, the biggest surprise to me is how effective it is at code.

Aaron Levie 37:50 Yeah.

Martin Casado 37:51 Um, and so my sense is... So I'm just gonna say a couple of like, you know, I think facts, and then we can kinda back out what this means in aggregate.

Aaron Levie 38:00 [laughs]

Martin Casado 38:00 So I think one fact is, the reality is, is I do think that AI helps better developers more than not better developers.

Aaron Levie 38:09 Yeah.

Martin Casado 38:09 And the reason is you just have to deal with and be able to like know what to ask for and know how to deal with the outcome. So I think that's one. Um, uh, someone said it, I thought beautifully, which was, you know, this is a very good developer, and this was on X, I forgot who it was, but I thought it capsulated. He's like, you know, "90% of like what I know, the value of it has gone to zero, but 10% has tripled."

Aaron Levie 38:29 More important than the AI [laughs] yeah.

Martin Casado 38:30 [laughs] More than 10X or whatever it is, like that-

Aaron Levie 38:32 Yeah

Martin Casado 38:32 ... 100X.

Aaron Levie 38:33 Yeah.

Martin Casado 38:33 And I think that's exactly right.Um, I do think that for a lot of rote use cases, the AI can do it and it doesn't need to be double-checked.

Aaron Levie 38:42 Yeah.

Martin Casado 38:42 So there's a lot, to your point, like things like prototyping, things like scripting, like... And so, you know, I do think if you look at usage of like OpenAI, um, like if you actually look at the, the code usage, it's, it-- Like the primary use is actually professional developers-

Aaron Levie 38:56 Yeah

Martin Casado 38:56 ... which means it's part of a, a developer workflow. And then, and then probably the most controversial stance I have is, and, and this is probably like sunk cost fallacy because I've been a programmer for, I mean, like my PhD is in computer science. Like, you know, so maybe this is sunk cost fallacy, but I just don't see a world when, where you get rid of formal programming languages.

Aaron Levie 39:14 Yeah.

Martin Casado 39:15 Just because they arose out of natural languages for a reason. Like-

Aaron Levie 39:18 Right

Martin Casado 39:19 ... [chuckles] we started with English, and then we made programming languages so that we could formally-

Aaron Levie 39:23 Yes

Martin Casado 39:23 ... describe stuff. And so like it'd be kind of a regression to go back. So I still think-

Aaron Levie 39:26 Yeah

Martin Casado 39:26 ... we'll use languages, and maybe they'll change, maybe more like a scripting language. But I think like the, the existing tool set will evolve, but it'll still be a professional developer. Like I think-

Aaron Levie 39:34 Yeah

Martin Casado 39:34 ... we'll still have developers, still have developer tools.

Aaron Levie 39:36 Yeah.

Martin Casado 39:36 So that's kind of where I am.

Aaron Levie 39:37 Yeah.

Martin Casado 39:37 I would love to hear where you're at.

Aaron Levie 39:38 No, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm fully, I'm on the exact same page. The, um, the fun, the fun thing to me is the, is, uh, how the, uh, h- coding is just at the tip of the kind of iceberg of, of then... You, you know, it's like the best, it's, it's the best thing to first get, you know, sort of experience agentic automation.

Martin Casado 39:58 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 39:59 Um, but I think you'll see this in basically every other space.

Martin Casado 40:01 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 40:01 But what's so fun is just in a one-year shift, let's say-

Martin Casado 40:05 Yeah

Aaron Levie 40:05 ... of, of like the nature of the relationship with the AI.

Martin Casado 40:09 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 40:09 So if you think about like the GitHub Copilot moment was like-

Martin Casado 40:13 Yeah

Aaron Levie 40:13 ... oh, this thing is incredible. It's gonna type ahead-

Martin Casado 40:15 Yeah

Aaron Levie 40:15 ... and, and predict what I'm typing.

Martin Casado 40:17 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 40:17 And then, and then it's, you're basically using it to work 20 or 30%, you know, faster and which, which, you know, uh, which parts of it do you, do you take on or not? And, you know, now the relationship is, is like totally different within, again, a, a year or two period-

Martin Casado 40:33 Yeah

Aaron Levie 40:33 ... where you're using Cursor or Windsurf or whatever, and the agent is, is generating this chunk of, of an output-

Martin Casado 40:40 Yeah

Aaron Levie 40:40 ... and then you're just reviewing it.

Martin Casado 40:41 Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 40:41 And, and that... The, the-- But what's, what's incredible is like none of your expertise is any less valuable-

Martin Casado 40:47 Yeah

Aaron Levie 40:48 ... in that review. In fact, it's-

Martin Casado 40:49 Right

Aaron Levie 40:49 ... it's, it's probably even more important than ever before-

Martin Casado 40:52 Yeah

Aaron Levie 40:52 ... because you're gonna get, in some cases, like it'll, it's just gonna be like wrong 3% of the time.

Martin Casado 40:57 Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 40:57 And then you review it, but then you're literally doing 3X the amount of output.

Martin Casado 41:01 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 41:01 And like the, the nature of how that changes both programming, but just ev-- Like why not have, why not have that for basically everything is sort of this, this new way that both software should work, and then actually we will work is like, is, you know, we were... Like the, the big joke, you know, a year after ChatGPT is like, okay, this thing generates a legal case and it's like wrong 10% of the time. And it's like, well, actually, hold on. Like that's not... Like if you think about what this, like the new paradigm of work looks like-

Martin Casado 41:29 Yeah

Aaron Levie 41:29 ... that might, like sure, it should be 1% of the time.

Martin Casado 41:31 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 41:32 But the job is you deploy a task.

Martin Casado 41:33 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 41:34 It generates a thing.

Martin Casado 41:35 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 41:36 It comes back.

Martin Casado 41:36 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 41:37 You should expect that it's 2% wrong.

Martin Casado 41:39 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 41:39 And then your job is to go and fix its errors.

Martin Casado 41:41 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 41:42 And, and it's like such a, a weird inversion of it used to be the AI was fixing your errors.

Martin Casado 41:48 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 41:48 That's what we thought the AI was gonna be.

Martin Casado 41:50 Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 41:50 And it's, and it's just like a totally, total flip.

Martin Casado 41:52 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 41:52 It's like the human, the human's job is to fix the AI errors.

Martin Casado 41:55 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 41:55 And that's the new way that we are going to work.

Martin Casado 41:57 Right. So this, this be- this begs a very obvious question. I'm gonna work up to the question. So there is a great, uh, paper in NSDI, um, from an MIT team, which basically says you can optimize a running system with agents. And the way they did it is they, they basically had like a, a teacher agent and then like more junior agents, and then the more junior agents would go try a bunch of stuff. And of course, they had much more knowledge of the literature than, you know, any single human being. So they'd try all of different things to try it, and then the one at the, you know, the, the, the senior agent would say, "Oh, this is good. This isn't good." And then, you know, once it optimized the system, they would do it. And then of course, the person that was running, you know, like the, the human being is then kind of like helping the teacher a-agent decide like what are, what are the parameters, what is good, what is not good, and provide high-level direction, right? And so you're already starting to see, um, you know, cases where human beings are running multiple agents-

Aaron Levie 42:51 Yeah

Martin Casado 42:51 ... and even that already is starting to have some kind of bifurcation, which one way to think about it is in any R&D organization, of course, people start as like ICs, but then they very quickly

Martin Casado 43:03 get interns and go into management, and so maybe we're just skipping that step.

Aaron Levie 43:06 Right.

Martin Casado 43:06 So the obvious question is, is what happens to entry-level engineers? Like, does this change how people get introduced to computer science, for example?

Aaron Levie 43:15 The cool thing is probably more people will even now get introduced to computer science.

Martin Casado 43:19 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 43:19 So, um, because you'll be able to, uh, you-

Martin Casado 43:22 Anybody can learn

Aaron Levie 43:22 ... anybody can learn it.

Martin Casado 43:24 Yeah, yeah. Sure.

Aaron Levie 43:24 And, and like, uh, you know, it's been 25 years for me, but like in the early days of like programming basic applications or putting together websites, it was just extremely frustrating that you'd spend-

Martin Casado 43:35 [laughs] Oh, my

Aaron Levie 43:35 ... you'd spend a- you know, days and days being like-

Martin Casado 43:37 Oh

Aaron Levie 43:37 ... "Why does that thing not work?"

Martin Casado 43:38 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 43:39 And it was like, and like I had n- I had very few resources of like-

Martin Casado 43:42 Yeah

Aaron Levie 43:42 ... figuring out why the thing didn't work.

Martin Casado 43:44 Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 43:44 It would've been 100 times easier if I could've had an agent write the thing. I would've learned, I would've learned 10 times faster.

Martin Casado 43:49 Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 43:50 Be- and, and, and-

Martin Casado 43:50 I mean, honestly, what you did is you were like, well, not, not 25 years ago, but 10 years ago, you'd go to Stack Overflow.

Aaron Levie 43:55 Yeah.

Martin Casado 43:55 And so it was like the slow version of-

Aaron Levie 43:57 Yeah, but so think about how many people missed the window pre-Stack Overflow-

Martin Casado 44:01 Yeah

Aaron Levie 44:01 ... that got sort of pushed out of the ecosystem-

Martin Casado 44:04 Yeah

Aaron Levie 44:04 ... because they're just like, "This is too frustrating."

Martin Casado 44:05 Fuck this, yeah.

Aaron Levie 44:06 And so you're gonna have a way bigger funnel at the top-

Martin Casado 44:08 100%, yeah

Aaron Levie 44:08 ... of, of people now learning, uh, programming computer science. I think, you know, a similar percentage of people will f- will, will fall out, so it's not like, again, you're gonna get a 10X increase in-

Martin Casado 44:17 Yeah

Aaron Levie 44:17 ... in programmers, 'cause you still have to enjoy it, and you have to like solving problems and, and whatnot. Um, it's gonna change the nature of, of the incoming class of engineers that you hire.

Martin Casado 44:26 Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 44:27 Like, like they will literally not be able to code without AI assistant, a-assisting them. And it's not 100% obvious that that's a bad thing because-

Martin Casado 44:35 Yeah. Yep, yep, yep

Aaron Levie 44:35 ... assuming you have internet and the, the site stays up, like we should have access to the agents. So I think it's mostly, mostly just like we have to adapt how we think about the role of an engineer-

Martin Casado 44:44 Yeah

Aaron Levie 44:44 ... and, and what these tools are, are giving us in terms of the, the productivity gains. Um, I'm actually, uh, a- likeI meet with a lot of like lar- like larger not tech-oriented companies as customers.

Martin Casado 44:57 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 44:57 And generally the thing I'm recommending is like hire a bunch of these people-

Martin Casado 45:00 Yeah

Aaron Levie 45:01 ... because they're going to flip your company on its head of like of how much faster the, the organization can run. So I do understand, I wanna be sympathetic to the job market for anybody coming out of college-

Martin Casado 45:11 Yeah

Aaron Levie 45:12 ... 'cause I, um, it's like I don't think it's easy right now, and, and it probably hasn't been easy in a number of years.

Martin Casado 45:17 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 45:17 But if you are graduating-

Martin Casado 45:20 Yeah

Aaron Levie 45:21 ... the thing I would be selling any corporation some way or another is that, is that like if you are AI native right now-

Martin Casado 45:27 Yeah

Aaron Levie 45:27 ... coming out of college-

Martin Casado 45:28 Yeah

Aaron Levie 45:28 ... the amount you can teach a company-

Martin Casado 45:30 Yeah, yeah, yeah

Aaron Levie 45:30 ... is unbelievable.

Martin Casado 45:31 Totally.

Aaron Levie 45:31 And then in, in, you know, conversely, if you're a company-

Martin Casado 45:33 Yeah

Aaron Levie 45:34 ... you should be actually like prioritizing this talent-

Martin Casado 45:36 Yeah

Aaron Levie 45:36 ... that is just like why does it take you guys two weeks to research a market to enter? Like, I can do that in deep research and get an answer to you-

Martin Casado 45:44 Yeah, yeah

Aaron Levie 45:44 ... in 30 minutes.

Martin Casado 45:45 Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 45:45 And like, and just like everything can... They, they, they, they will be able to show companies way faster ways of working.

Martin Casado 45:52 Do you think there's any stumbling into problems this way, which is like you kind of adopt it too quickly [laughs] and like you, you get into a morass you can't get out of, or you think at this point it's pretty clear this stuff can be practically consumed?

Aaron Levie 46:04 Uh, what would the, what would the morass be that you'd get into?

Martin Casado 46:06 You, you hire a bunch of vibe coders and then-

Aaron Levie 46:08 [laughs]

Martin Casado 46:08 ... they create something that nobody can maintain and it's really slow.

Aaron Levie 46:10 Oh, yeah, yeah, totally.

Martin Casado 46:10 And like-

Aaron Levie 46:11 Totally. Uh-

Martin Casado 46:12 Which by the way-

Aaron Levie 46:13 Yeah. Yeah

Martin Casado 46:13 ... I will say I have seen this.

Aaron Levie 46:14 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, okay. Uh, you, there's a, you could easily overdo this whole thing.

Martin Casado 46:18 Okay. [laughs]

Aaron Levie 46:18 So, um, you, you could very much, uh, m- I, I think, I think, uh, as with anything, like, like, uh, deploying these strategies in moderation-

Martin Casado 46:28 Yeah

Aaron Levie 46:28 ... while we're all collectively still getting the technology to work better and better-

Martin Casado 46:31 Yeah

Aaron Levie 46:31 ... is super important.

Martin Casado 46:32 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 46:32 And understanding the consequences o- of these systems. Um, so, um, so yes, this is not like a moment to just like have your whole company vibe code.

Martin Casado 46:40 I, I will say one of my favorite things that I'm witnessing in the whole coding thing, I know there was, you know, like the, the point of this talk is kind of the AI and the enterprise generally, but like the, the coding thing is just so, so, so, uh, salient, is that a lot of the, these OG programmers that I've known for a long time that are off creating companies or CEOs of public companies like yourself are all back to programming.

Aaron Levie 46:58 Yeah.

Martin Casado 46:58 Then you talk to them, and I, you know, many of them, I, like I code, and you know, uh, most nights with Cursor just because it's really enjoyable. And the reason I didn't code before is 'cause like I just couldn't keep up with the fucking frameworks.

Aaron Levie 47:09 Mm.

Martin Casado 47:09 I'm like, "Dude, you gotta like-

Aaron Levie 47:10 [laughs]

Martin Casado 47:10 ... I don't know how to install the fucking thing-

Aaron Levie 47:11 Yeah, yeah

Martin Casado 47:11 ... and like what is this Python environment stuff?"

Aaron Levie 47:13 Yeah.

Martin Casado 47:13 And like, like I just didn't, you know, it's just like you have to learn all... And like you're literally learning bad design choices-

Aaron Levie 47:19 Yeah

Martin Casado 47:19 ... that somebody else just made up. Like, they're not fundamental to the laws of the universe. They don't make you any smarter.

Aaron Levie 47:24 Right.

Martin Casado 47:24 It's just like waste of brain space.

Aaron Levie 47:26 Well-

Martin Casado 47:26 And so in some way the AI just gets rid of this kind of crufty stuff that you probably shouldn't be wasting brain space on anyway.

Aaron Levie 47:32 Well, well, the, the mi- so like the, um, uh, the amount of frustration I have when I look through, let's say, our product roadmap-

Martin Casado 47:40 Yeah

Aaron Levie 47:41 ... um, let's say pre-AI.

Martin Casado 47:43 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 47:43 Al- although this still obviously happens 'cause we haven't fully transformed everything about how we work, but pre-AI, when you would see things like we have to upgrade the Python library in this, in this particular product-

Martin Casado 47:53 Yeah. [laughs]

Aaron Levie 47:53 ... and it's like three engineer-

Martin Casado 47:56 [laughs] Totally

Aaron Levie 47:56 ... two, two quarters.

Martin Casado 47:57 No, exactly.

Aaron Levie 47:57 And like at the end of that project-

Martin Casado 47:59 Yeah

Aaron Levie 47:59 ... zero customers will notice-

Martin Casado 48:00 Yeah

Aaron Levie 48:01 ... that we did something.

Martin Casado 48:01 Yeah. Yeah. 100%.

Aaron Levie 48:02 We, we resolved some fringe vulnerability-

Martin Casado 48:04 Yeah

Aaron Levie 48:05 ... that is like not gonna even happen.

Martin Casado 48:06 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 48:06 But you have to do it because there's some-

Martin Casado 48:08 Yeah

Aaron Levie 48:08 ... there's some compliance thing-

Martin Casado 48:09 Yeah

Aaron Levie 48:09 ... where you have to make sure you're on the latest-

Martin Casado 48:11 Yeah

Aaron Levie 48:11 ... you know, version.

Martin Casado 48:12 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 48:12 Which is super important.

Martin Casado 48:13 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 48:14 But like the thing is never gonna happen.

Martin Casado 48:15 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 48:15 And all of a sudden, like you are, are, are wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars of engineering time.

Martin Casado 48:20 Yeah. Yep, yep.

Aaron Levie 48:21 And the fact that like that's now like a Codex task-

Martin Casado 48:23 Yeah. Yeah

Aaron Levie 48:23 ... is just unbelievable.

Martin Casado 48:24 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 48:25 And the amount of, like the amount of, of just now

Aaron Levie 48:28 s- things that you, you can actually relieve your team to go and work on is incredible.

Martin Casado 48:32 Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 48:32 And the other big like boon for, for, uh, the economy, and this is again where the economists just totally miss this stuff, is think about every small business on the planet, of which there's-

Martin Casado 48:42 Yeah

Aaron Levie 48:42 ... millions, tens of millions, whatever.

Martin Casado 48:43 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 48:44 That for the first time ever in history, they have access to resources that are somewhat approximate to-

Martin Casado 48:49 Yeah

Aaron Levie 48:49 ... the resources of a large company.

Martin Casado 48:50 Yeah. The biggest company.

Aaron Levie 48:51 Like-

Martin Casado 48:51 Ever. 100%

Aaron Levie 48:51 ... they, they can do any marketing campaign. Uh-

Martin Casado 48:54 I know

Aaron Levie 48:54 ... did you see the NBA Finals video for, from Kalshi?

Martin Casado 48:56 No.

Aaron Levie 48:57 Um, the VO3 video?

Martin Casado 48:58 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 48:59 Yeah.

Martin Casado 48:59 Yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 48:59 Like-

Martin Casado 48:59 Yeah, yeah

Aaron Levie 48:59 ... like you can now put together-

Martin Casado 49:01 Yeah. Right

Aaron Levie 49:01 ... a, an otherwise million-dollar marketing video-

Martin Casado 49:04 Yeah

Aaron Levie 49:04 ... for a couple hundred bucks of tokens.

Martin Casado 49:06 I know.

Aaron Levie 49:07 And, and that being applied to every domain-

Martin Casado 49:09 Right

Aaron Levie 49:09 ... in every, in every service area.

Martin Casado 49:11 Oh, endless. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 49:11 I can, I can run a campaign that translates into every language. I can, I can, you know, have this long tail of bugs that, that I never got around to auto- automatically get solved. I can have the analysis of a top-tier consulting firm done for my particular business.

Martin Casado 49:27 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 49:27 So for the, the people or companies that, that are resourceful and, and are, you know, creative and ex- and imaginative, the access to resources right now is just like truly, like just unprecedented.

Martin Casado 49:39 What do you think is the best metric for anybody interested in tracking this stuff as far as like how fast it's going? Is it, is it GDP? Is it margin? Is it top line? Is it head count growth? Is it all the above?

Aaron Levie 49:50 Um-

Martin Casado 49:50 How do, how do, like how do you measure it?

Aaron Levie 49:52 Yeah. I mean, for us-So internally first and then, and then maybe the macro, maybe like we'll spitball some macro solutions to this.

Martin Casado 50:00 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 50:00 Internally spec- uh, we've actually explicitly taken the stance that we want to use AI to increase the capacity and capability of the company-

Martin Casado 50:07 Yeah

Aaron Levie 50:07 ... to just do more.

Martin Casado 50:08 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 50:08 Like, and then, and even-

Martin Casado 50:10 For, for anything that you track, just make sure it happens fast.

Aaron Levie 50:13 Just do more. Just do more.

Martin Casado 50:13 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 50:13 Just like, just like-

Martin Casado 50:14 More, do more-

Aaron Levie 50:14 Do more or do faster. Either, either of the measures.

Martin Casado 50:15 In a given, in a given time period. Yeah, of course.

Aaron Levie 50:16 And, and so that somewhat relieves the pressure from people-

Martin Casado 50:20 Yeah

Aaron Levie 50:20 ... that like this is about cost cutting.

Martin Casado 50:22 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 50:22 It's just like, "No, no, just like do more right now."

Martin Casado 50:24 Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 50:24 Like, let's figure out what works.

Martin Casado 50:25 Oh, I love that.

Aaron Levie 50:25 Some things won't work.

Martin Casado 50:26 I love that. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 50:26 We want experimentation, so just use AI to do more. Okay. So that's us. The way you should measure that then in a couple years from now is either the growth rate of the company should be faster-

Martin Casado 50:36 Yeah

Aaron Levie 50:37 ... or the amount of things that, that, you know, we're collectively doing should be more and the only reason that that wouldn't show up in growth rate is that every other company also does more, and so that gets com- competed away.

Martin Casado 50:47 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 50:47 Which is like also a very viable outcome is like-

Martin Casado 50:50 Yeah

Aaron Levie 50:50 ... this is just the new standard of running a business.

Martin Casado 50:52 But, but there's, but there's no, there's no shift in the equilibrium.

Aaron Levie 50:54 Right.

Martin Casado 50:54 Right.

Aaron Levie 50:54 There's no shift in the equilibrium.

Martin Casado 50:55 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 50:55 You just have to do it.

Martin Casado 50:56 Right.

Aaron Levie 50:57 And, and then the ultimate product of all of that-

Martin Casado 50:59 Yeah

Aaron Levie 50:59 ... is some other kind of metric of satisfaction of like our products get better. Like, like-

Martin Casado 51:04 Yeah. It could be, it could be like consumer price index or something like that.

Aaron Levie 51:06 Y- yeah. Well, but like did, did the iPhone show up in GDP? I don't know, but my life is better with the iPhone pre than, than, than without the iPhone.

Martin Casado 51:12 I'm pre- I'm pretty sure it did. [laughs]

Aaron Levie 51:13 Okay, yeah, fine.

Martin Casado 51:13 It's like... [laughs]

Aaron Levie 51:14 So, but like it would show up then like-

Martin Casado 51:16 Yeah

Aaron Levie 51:16 ... you know, it would ultimately then show up in like-

Martin Casado 51:18 Yeah

Aaron Levie 51:18 ... new cures to diseases-

Martin Casado 51:20 Right. Yeah

Aaron Levie 51:20 ... better healthcare.

Martin Casado 51:21 Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 51:21 Like, I don't know that the dollars would move around all that differently-

Martin Casado 51:24 Yeah

Aaron Levie 51:24 ... as much as just like, like life expectancy should go up.

Martin Casado 51:28 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 51:28 Like cost of housing should go down. Like weird metrics-

Martin Casado 51:30 Yeah

Aaron Levie 51:31 ... that productivity gains will then drive-

Martin Casado 51:33 Yeah

Aaron Levie 51:33 ... that the economists wouldn't, you know, naturally associate to like enterprise software-

Martin Casado 51:38 Yeah

Aaron Levie 51:38 ... and AI.

Martin Casado 51:38 I, um, this is by the way, this is where I am, which is like clearly there's a disruption 'cause marginal costs are going down in a bunch of stuff-

Aaron Levie 51:45 Yeah

Martin Casado 51:45 ... like writing code and language reasoning and whatever, and like some companies will take advantage of that. But I don't think like the fundamental equilibrium changes. I think to your point, I think we just like do more tech, you know, products get better faster.

Aaron Levie 51:56 Yeah.

Martin Casado 51:57 We solve problems that we haven't before, but like it's not, it's not asymmetric that we've seen in, in, in other things.

Aaron Levie 52:01 Yeah. The way I kind of think about it is like I, you know, if we go back to like 1985-

Martin Casado 52:05 Yeah

Aaron Levie 52:05 ... and we just like looked at how everybody works-

Martin Casado 52:07 Yeah

Aaron Levie 52:07 ... I think we would just be totally stunned by how slow everything is.

Martin Casado 52:10 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 52:10 And just like, like, like how long did it take you to research a thing-

Martin Casado 52:14 Yeah

Aaron Levie 52:14 ... or analyze a market or analyze it or create a campaign or whatever.

Martin Casado 52:17 Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 52:18 And it's just like, but like it just has now been baked into our human productivity that we just-

Martin Casado 52:22 Yeah

Aaron Levie 52:22 ... do all those things really fast now.

Martin Casado 52:24 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 52:24 And so in 10 years from now when we all have AI agents running around, we will just look back to today and be like, "How did we function?" Like you spent two weeks to decide like your, the message for the marketing campaign.

Martin Casado 52:37 [laughs]

Aaron Levie 52:37 Like how is that possible?

Martin Casado 52:38 Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 52:38 Like what we do now is we run 50 experiments with AI agents. They all come back with versions, we look at them all together, and then we make a decision in an hour and we move on. Like that's obviously like how work works, and like that's what we will be saying in 10 years from now.

Martin Casado 52:51 Do you think we'll ever saturate the consumer?

Aaron Levie 52:54 Um, y-

Martin Casado 52:56 And I, by the way, I caveat this by-

Aaron Levie 52:57 Yeah

Martin Casado 52:58 ... saying this comes up every one of these inflection points.

Aaron Levie 53:00 Yeah.

Martin Casado 53:00 And so I just wanted to ask it again for the, the umpteenth time.

Aaron Levie 53:03 I, I think, uh, I, I, I'll, I'll say yes just because at some point maybe, but like I... my list of, of con- purely consumer demands is, has not like gone down. Like-

Martin Casado 53:13 Yeah, totally

Aaron Levie 53:13 ... like healthcare is like a totally unmet-

Martin Casado 53:16 100%

Aaron Levie 53:17 ... you know, need that I have.

Martin Casado 53:18 100%. Of course.

Aaron Levie 53:18 Like I do not like to go to doctors or dentists or anybody because of just how hard it is to get scheduled.

Martin Casado 53:24 I mean, buying a fucking car, man. Like there are so many things-

Aaron Levie 53:27 Buying... Yes. 100%

Martin Casado 53:27 ... that like just need to be so- yeah.

Aaron Levie 53:28 The cost of housing.

Martin Casado 53:29 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 53:29 We clearly don't have enough houses.

Martin Casado 53:30 Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 53:30 Like now where will AI, you know, drive that? Okay, so, you know, maybe that's, that's a... well, maybe robotics-

Martin Casado 53:35 Yeah. It's true

Aaron Levie 53:35 ... would be then the play there. But like, but like I, I don't think we're anywhere close to like consumer satisfaction or, or satisfying all, all needs of consumers.

Martin Casado 53:43 Well, I, I actually, I meant a l- more like will things change so fast that like it saturates the ability to adopt new things?

Aaron Levie 53:52 I, I do think that, that that is, uh, that, that is certainly possible. Um, I think I, I, I track sort of let's say my, my parents as a, as a decent kind of, you know, kind of proxy or even just friends that-

Martin Casado 54:04 Yeah. Yeah

Aaron Levie 54:04 ... like college friends that aren't particularly in tech.

Martin Casado 54:07 Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 54:07 And they're still like in their ChatGPT phase-

Martin Casado 54:10 Yeah

Aaron Levie 54:10 ... of adoption.

Martin Casado 54:10 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 54:10 And like they haven't moved on from that. They're not making... They haven't made a VEO video yet.

Martin Casado 54:13 Yeah. Yeah. [laughs]

Aaron Levie 54:14 Like they're, they're just like, they're just like using ChatGPT to ask questions-

Martin Casado 54:17 Yeah

Aaron Levie 54:17 ... about, about life experiences they have. And so, you know, maybe ironically like one of the problems was ChatGPT was so good that it like has... it is like, you know, if you, if you like, you know, imagine what people thought AI should be able to do for them, it already met like 80% of like where they would've-

Martin Casado 54:35 [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah

Aaron Levie 54:35 ... you know, sort of projected it.

Martin Casado 54:36 Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 54:36 And but when we know actually no, it can probably still do twen- you know, 10 to 20X more.

Martin Casado 54:41 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 54:41 But their needs are gonna be satisfied for some time-

Martin Casado 54:43 Yeah

Aaron Levie 54:44 ... on, on those core use cases.

Martin Casado 54:45 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 54:45 So I think, I think for like the most basic consumer query type things, but then, but then this is the opportunity for startups, which is like now AI will show up in sort of ways that maybe the person isn't even like in the market for an AI thing. They just want a better-

Martin Casado 55:00 Yeah. I was gonna say-

Aaron Levie 55:01 ... version of that category

Martin Casado 55:01 ... I was gonna say this could just like simply be another market constraint-

Aaron Levie 55:05 Yes

Martin Casado 55:05 ... as soon as it saturates, you just make the product better given like the existing-

Aaron Levie 55:08 Yeah. And, and like you'll just like-

Martin Casado 55:09 Yeah. Right. Yeah. Fair

Aaron Levie 55:10 ... if I could just get better healthcare-

Martin Casado 55:11 Yeah. Yeah. Of course

Aaron Levie 55:12 ... and but I don't need to think about that as an AI problem or not an AI problem.

Martin Casado 55:14 Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron Levie 55:14 But AI will be behind the scenes delivering that.

Martin Casado 55:17 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 55:17 Then I don't think you're saturated anytime soon.

Martin Casado 55:19 Yeah. It's just the consum- the consumption, the consumption capacity just becomes another market constraint-

Aaron Levie 55:23 Exactly

Martin Casado 55:23 ... but there's a ton of other ways that you can improve things, which is-

Aaron Levie 55:25 100%

Martin Casado 55:25 ... that's great. Good. I love that you're so optimistic about it.

Aaron Levie 55:28 I am, uh-

Martin Casado 55:29 Yeah. That's great

Aaron Levie 55:29 ... I'm, I'm, uh, I think 98th percentile optimistic, so.

Martin Casado 55:33 Same. Good. All right. So I think we've had a fairly pragmatic

Martin Casado 55:36 conversation about like the current impacts-

Aaron Levie 55:39 Yeah

Martin Casado 55:39 ... and the near term impacts. If you do a longer view, can you dare to guess what things look like in five to 10 years or-

Aaron Levie 55:48 I think, um, uh, so Sam, Sam Altman and Jack Altman had a podcast recently.

Martin Casado 55:53 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Aaron Levie 55:54 And-

Martin Casado 55:54 It was very good

Aaron Levie 55:55 ... I'm gonna, I'm gonna, you know, paraphrase probably, you know, in, in some wrong way, but like they were going back and forth about how like we, we just got, you know, what we would've predicted as AGI five years ago, and it's just like we use it.

Martin Casado 56:07 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 56:07 And it's like-

Martin Casado 56:08 Like, yeah [laughs]

Aaron Levie 56:08 ... and like it's now just built in.

Martin Casado 56:09 The most anticlimactic-

Aaron Levie 56:10 Yeah

Martin Casado 56:10 ... or the most climactic anti-climactic note.

Aaron Levie 56:12 And I think that's my instinct for a lot of this-

Martin Casado 56:15 Yeah

Aaron Levie 56:15 ... is five years, 10 years, whatever your number is, um, we should... And this is why I'm so optimistic-

Martin Casado 56:21 Yeah

Aaron Levie 56:21 ... is like o- on just society and jobs and all this stuff, is like I don't think it's the Terminator-

Martin Casado 56:26 Yeah

Aaron Levie 56:26 ... kind of crazy outcome, you know, scenario of we automate away everything. I think, I think the human capacity for wanting to solve new problems, for creating new products, for serving customers in new ways, um, uh, for delivering better healthcare, to try and do scientific discovery, like all of this stuff just will, w- is just like built in us.

Martin Casado 56:47 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 56:47 And it will continue.

Martin Casado 56:48 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 56:48 And AI is this kind of upleveling of the tools that we use to do all those things. And so I think the, the way we work will be totally different in five years or 10 years.

Martin Casado 56:58 Totally.

Aaron Levie 56:59 But y- you're already seeing enough of probably what it will look like, that I think it's an extrapolation of that. It's when you want the marketing campaign done, you have a set of agents that go and create the assets and ch- choose the markets and figure out the ad plan, and then you have a, a few people review it and debate it, and say, "Okay," like, "let's go in this direction instead." And then you deploy it and you're onto the next thing.

Martin Casado 57:21 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 57:22 And so each company, their, their units of output grow. As a result of that growth, you know, we're all still in competitive spaces so, so some of it gets competed out, and others will keep growing faster than they would've before, so they'll hire more people, and those will be... You'll have new types of jobs, like we'll have jobs for people just to manage agents, and like you'll have operations teams. You know, Adam D'Angelo had this cool role that just kind of got announced of-

Martin Casado 57:45 Yeah. Yeah, that was really cool. Yeah

Aaron Levie 57:46 ... yeah, the role is to work with Adam at, at Quora and figure out which workflows can be automated with AI.

Martin Casado 57:51 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 57:51 I think you'll have a lot of those kind of functions.

Martin Casado 57:53 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 57:53 But I think, you know, one of the exciting things about, at least being in Silicon Valley or anybody kind of tuning in, you know, being in this ecosystem, is like we're seeing the change happen faster here.

Martin Casado 58:03 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 58:03 And it's gonna be five or 10 years of this rolling out-

Martin Casado 58:06 Yeah

Aaron Levie 58:06 ... to the rest of the economy.

Martin Casado 58:07 Yeah.

Aaron Levie 58:08 And so I think, I think it's gonna be, you know, pr- uh, we, we will spend the next five years making the technology actually deliver on the things that we're all collectively talking about, and it just, to make it more and more robust, and the accuracy goes up, and the costs go down, and the workflows it can tie into are better, and we will be working on that for, for quite some time.

Martin Casado 58:27 And, and you think ultimately this leads to the biggest peace dividend of better products for users, better user experience?

Aaron Levie 58:37 Yeah. I think, I think the, the software gets better, our healthcare gets better, the life sciences discoveries increase.

Martin Casado 58:42 Amazing.

Aaron Levie 58:43 Um, I, I think it's all, it, it, it's all a society net positive.

Martin Casado 58:46 I love it. [upbeat music]