Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, on Box AI, Enterprise Enthusiasm, and the Evolution of SaaS
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What personal AI tools does Aaron Levie use and how does he view the future of AGI?
The rate of change that we're seeing and the rate of just exponential improvement that we're seeing from AI models is incredible. And I would assume if we keep that pace up, I think these systems will increasingly be able to perform any kind of general task. Jensen at NVIDIA kind of put it the the best, which is, you know, uh effectively the IT department becomes the HR department of AI. And that just opens up so many new questions. about what the future of IT looks like. I think we're entering a new era with with systems of intelligence that let us combine data, AI, and underlying enterprise software to go and automate, you know, really anything about our business. There's gonna be a tremendous amount of AI startup opportunity, but it will not come from just doing, you know, s a s an AI first C R M system because you should anticipate that Salesforce is an AI first CRM system.
Hello and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution. Today I'm excited to share my conversation with Aaron Levy, founder and CEO of Box, the Intelligent Content Cloud. Box Powers Secure Collaboration manages over one hundred billion documents, and is now introducing AI powered workflow automation for more than a hundred thousand customers globally, including such diverse household names as pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, legendary nonprofit Teach for America, Investment Bank Morgan Stanley, Peer-to-Peer Rental Market Airbnb, the one trillion dollar chipmaker Broadcom, and even the United States Air Force. As you'll hear, Aaron says that leadership at these organizations is now more energized about AI than they've ever been about any other technology in the history of his career, including cloud computing, where Box was an early enterprise SaaS pioneer.
While cloud adoption faced initial skepticism and resistance around security and compliance and just needing to do things differently, enterprises today are eagerly exploring use cases for AI. In many cases, Aaron says, perhaps more than is immediately practical. Box is of course racing to meet the moment by building new AI functionality into all aspects of their platform. And they recently launched Box AI to help enterprises get more value from their unstructured data in a secure, controlled way. We discussed several key capabilities, including natural language querying across enterprise content, automated metadata extraction, and their vision for AI agents that can autonomously perform workflows like contract review and routing.
Aaron shares a number of technical details on how Box is now layering foundation model capabilities onto their existing foundational features, like their hubs product, which they originally developed before the current AI moment to allow users to curate canonical, authoritative versions of key documents, and which has proven to be the perfect base on which to build accurate, reliable, retrieval augmented generation experiences at scale. We also dig into key questions facing enterprises and the software companies that serve them, including how IT departments will need to evolve from supporting work to actually performing work with AI agents, the transition from per seat to consumption based and other pricing models, and whether startups can compete with incumbents who are racing to add AI capabilities.
Aaron makes the case that while incumbents will continue to dominate many established markets, there is still massive opportunity for AI native startups to build fundamentally new products that work across platforms and address unmet needs. As always, if you're finding value in the show, we'd appreciate it if you'd take a moment to share it with friends, leave us a review on Apple or Spotify, or drop a comment on YouTube. And always feel free to share your feedback, either via our website, cognitive revolution.ai, or by DMing me on your favorite social network. I got a lot of encouraging messages after the recent AMA and R1 episodes, and it was great to hear from so many listeners. So please do keep it coming.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What personal AI tools does Aaron Levie use and how does he view the future of AGI?
0:00–7:23
2
Why are enterprises more excited about AI now than they were about cloud adoption?
7:23–13:35
3
How does the shift from cloud to AI change the mindset of IT departments?
13:35–19:40
4
What is Box AI and how does it enable natural‑language querying of unstructured content?
19:40–25:43
5
How are AI agents being built in Box and what workflows can they automate?
25:43–32:30
6
What are the biggest technical and organizational challenges to scaling AI in the enterprise?
32:30–38:25
7
How will AI‑first pricing models and consumption‑based billing reshape SaaS?
38:25–43:48
8
What measurable productivity gains is Box seeing from AI and what does the future of enterprise software look like?
43:48–50:15
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from "The Cognitive Revolution"
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