Agents in the Enterprise | Aaron Levie, CEO of Box | Ep. 3

[upbeat music] All right, Aaron, thanks for doing this. Really appreciate you making time. I know you're really busy, and it's really good to get to sit down and talk to you.

Good to be here. Uh, I'm, I'm actually always here, and so thank you for coming.

My pleasure. Um, so I wanna start by talking about something that you've been super vocal about online lately: AI agents, AI software in the enterprise. Obviously, everybody's talking about it, but you've been talking about it in, like, great detail-

Yeah

... and how it relates to Box. You've got this-

I thought you were gonna say that we were talking about it first.

Um, [chuckles]

Okay. [chuckles]

You got the- that's right, too. But can, can you tell me sort of briefly just, like, where are you sort of, um, where are you thinking about, you know, AI as it relates to Box?

Yeah.

How do you think agents are playing out right now? Obviously, this is what you're talking a ton about, but, like, what's sort of the kinda high level about what's in your mind right now?

So for us, the reason I'm, I'm just so, so pumped about AI right now is we've been building this platform for nearly two decades, uh, to help enterprises store, manage, share, collaborate on their most important data. And, um, and, you know, th- that data is their financial documents, their contracts, their marketing assets, their employee records, all that data. And inside of that information contains an incredible amount of value, but most of it is underutilized. And so, you know, you just think about what, what you mostly do with your files. You, you know, you create one, you share it, you collaborate, and then it goes somewhere, and you never see it again. And that, that... We, we, we just see that with the life cycle of data. Data, you know, starts out hot for the first couple o- you know, hours, couple days, week or two, and then it sort of you go- it goes into a place where you just manage it. It's actually really important to keep around because you might need to pull it up, like, five years later, or there might be some legal reason why you need it, but, uh, but you never tap into it in the meantime. You don't ask it questions. You can't pull out value from it, and yet it actually contains an incredible amount of wealth of, of, of value for an organization because it might have an insight that would lead to your next product discovery. It might re- you know, have information that would make a sales rep better at selling their product. It might have information that a new employee onboarding into a company will ramp up faster, but you have not been able to tap into it. So for us, A- AI is just this massive breakthrough, which is we can finally actually open up the value of all of this data that organizations are sitting on. We kind of are in the right place, right time in terms of having built out a platform that, uh, 115,000 customers trust. We're in about 67% of the Fortune 500, and companies have been using Box to be able to manage that data, automate workflows around it, secure that data, and now AI kind of plugs in right at the core of, of everything we're doing. So we're sort of running the company and, and imagining the company as if, you know, if we had started the company in 2025, what would we be building? How would we be running it? What would our business model be? And we're asking ourselves, like, like, "Are we doing everything as if we were starting from scratch in this new era of AI?" As opposed to, you know, the, the traditional challenge with, with being either an incumbent or, or some, some company that's been around for a while is you, you take too long to, to address a new technology. You don't sort of pivot hard enough. Uh, you, you don't reimagine your business model for that new era that, that's emerging. And so we're trying to, you know, learn all those lessons, m- maybe to some extent, to prevent anything bad from happening. But then I think just generally, I'm just way more excited about the upside of, of what's going on.