Aaron Levie on AI's Enterprise Adoption
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What does Aaron Levie see as the biggest opportunity for AI in the enterprise?
What is the journey over the next decade? It's about the speed at which humans can change their workflows. Why doesn't the breakthrough that we just saw get released? Why isn't that permeate every corporation within six months?
It's so strange to me how many disruptions are happening all at the same time. Your R and D is changing. Yep. You're like every part of the stack is changing. Like
everything. We're not in like a fear of AI world. We are in a, we know this is going to happen and 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 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 GDP? Is it margin? Is it top line? Is it headcount growth?
Is it all the above? It's basically fully assumed that AI is going to take over the enterprise.
How does AI actually change the enterprise? Not just in theory, but in how software is built, sold, and used? In today's episode, A16Z general partner Martin Casado sits down with Aaron Levy, co-founder and CEO of Box, to explore what it means to be an AI-first company from product strategy to internal workflows. They talk about why incumbents may be better positioned than expected, how startups can still break out, the rise of agents and vibe coding. and what happens when the bottleneck isn't the tech but the org chart. Aaron also shares how Box is using AI internally today and why he thinks the next generation of employees may spend more time managing agents than writing code. Let's get into it. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A sixteen Z fund.
Please note that A sixteen Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com forward slash disclosures.
Aaron, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you. Everybody here already knows you. However, I still think you should introduce yourself just for completeness.
Okay. Aaron Levy, CEO, co-founder of Box. And at Box we help enterprises basically take all of their unstructured data or enterprise content and turn it into valuable information. And AI is absolutely this incredible accelerant for that problem. I just learned that we're investors in you. W well many years ago, many years ago. So no claims post IPO, but actually Ben Horwitz had this early kind of blog post on basically I think it was the title The Fat Startup. Yeah. And in response to Enerprise's the lean startup, yeah. And let's just say we very much took that to heart and we basically like deployed every single lesson, which was like the name of that game is you get big fast, you scale aggressively, and that was a very important period in our company's
Journey.
So the notional topic of this is AI and the enterprise. But I think it's good to be kind of nuanced about this because it's less obvious than people think. And you've been talking a lot about AI on X, but also you're thinking about it in the terms of your business. So let me just kind of set up the first question as follows, which is AI has historically been this very B2B enterprise thing, like chatbots or whatever, personalization systems. But what's unique about Gen AI is a lot of the use cases are actually like a 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. Yep. So maybe just a couple of questions.
First off, A, does that match with your experience? And then B, how are you thinking about this transition to the enterprise.
Yeah. I think if you were to probably like do the idiosyncrasies of AI and then reverse engineer why that was the journey, basically up until let's say pre-Chat BT moment, AI was extremely hard to use.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What does Aaron Levie see as the biggest opportunity for AI in the enterprise?
0:01–7:03
2
How is AI changing the way unstructured data is accessed and used at Box?
7:03–14:04
3
Why do incumbents have an advantage over startups in AI adoption?
14:04–20:25
4
How will AI agents shift individual contributors from executors to orchestrators?
20:25–27:48
5
What new business models are emerging as AI moves from SaaS to usage‑based pricing?
27:48–34:03
6
How can vertical SaaS companies leverage domain expertise with AI agents?
34:03–41:03
7
What does the future of work look like when AI handles 90% of routine tasks?
41:03–47:17
8
What long‑term impact does Aaron predict AI will have on productivity, jobs, and society?
47:17–52:51
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The a16z Show
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