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Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

Inside Box’s AI playbook with founder & CEO Aaron Levie

21 May 2025

Description

Aaron Levie, CEO & co-founder of Box, joins Azeem Azhar to explore how an “AI-first” mindset is reshaping every layer of Box – from product road-maps to pricing – and what that teaches the rest of us about building faster, smarter organisations.Timestamps:(00:00) Episode trailer(02:04) The "lump of labor fallacy" in sci-fi books(07:37) When individual productivity gains don’t translate to teams(12:32) Box’s Friday AI demos(21:23) How agents might redefine 100 years of management science(26:37) A lesson on AI innovation from the early days of Ford(29:52) Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, and Sergey Brin are coding again?(35:16) Pricing in a post-AI agent world(38:43) Cheaper tokens, heavier usage: AI’s margin math(43:02) Solving AI’s verifiability problem(48:24) How Aaron uses AI in his personal lifeAaron's links:Box: https://www.box.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boxaaron/X/Twitter: https://x.com/levieAzeem’s links:Substack: https://www.exponentialview.co/Website: https://www.azeemazhar.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azharX/Twitter: https://x.com/azeemThis conversation was recorded for “Friday with Azeem Azhar”, live every Friday at 9 am PT / 12 pm ET. Catch it via Exponential View on Substack.Produced by supermix.io and EPIIPLUS1 Ltd Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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Full Episode

0.031 - 16.375 Aaron Levie

We're going to look at the last year and the next, let's say, two to three years as probably the most defining periods of workplace technology change that we'll ever live through. What would happen if many parts of your business, you could start to do things in an hour or two hours that would have otherwise taken a week?

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16.395 - 23.085 Azeem Azhar

Which parts of your business do you expect to disappear or become unrecognizable in the next 12 months?

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23.065 - 36.364 Aaron Levie

I think actually very few roles will sort of disappear kind of outright. I think it's what we will be doing in those roles that will fundamentally shift. We should have three, five, 10x more leverage as individuals inside of an organization. Everything that we do will be accelerated.

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36.644 - 44.095 Azeem Azhar

How should we think about a world of resourcing when agents start to appear and become more reliable?

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44.075 - 64.994 Aaron Levie

In that world, the IC is now a manager, and there's sort of no upper limit of how many agents they could be deploying. Then the question is, what is that manager of human managers of agents? What do they do? Should they also be managing agents? Open question. I mean, this is in the category of things that will change in a five-year period that might redefine 100 years of management science.

65.154 - 72.921 Azeem Azhar

I mean, it's super complicated because you have model releases every two weeks right now. The velocity is extremely fast.

72.941 - 82.975 Aaron Levie

It's this incredibly... exciting stressful crazy time but for those that enjoy learning and changing and evolving how they work this is a very exciting time to be diving into that

89.89 - 109.078 Azeem Azhar

Today, I'm really delighted to have Aaron Levy, the CEO and founder of Box as my guest. Box is a company, a product that I first came across, I reckon 20 years ago, before it had the .com domain. It was one of the first cloud storage companies in the world. Of course, now it does much more for enterprises.

109.518 - 135.237 Azeem Azhar

And Aaron has been leading a transformation of Box into an AI-first company, both for the company itself and for its customers. And Aaron, you've been really public. about the benefits that AI will bring to all of us. If Box is fast becoming an AI-first company, which part of your business do you expect to disappear or become unrecognizable in the next 12 months?

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