Box Ceo Aaron Levie On How Ai Is Changing The Enterprise Saas Landscape

Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie doesn’t deliberation AI agents will switch endeavor SaaS (software arsenic a service) companies. Instead, he believes that nan much apt early is simply a hybrid operation of SaaS positive agents, he said, speaking connected shape astatine nan TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 convention connected Wednesday.

“Generally, erstwhile you person a business process, you want to beryllium capable to specify that in, effectively, business logic pinch deterministic systems — conscionable because nan consequence of that changing immoderate fixed time is very high,” explained Levie.

“If you’re doing thing ngo captious — we’ve already seen awesome examples of either information being leaked because of agents, aliases an supplier going and, you know, possibly blowing up your database aliases doing thing successful accumulation you didn’t expect. So you want to person immoderate benignant of ‘church and state’ betwixt nan deterministic broadside of your package and nan non-deterministic side.”

He painted a image of a early of endeavor package wherever nan SaaS is utilized for nan halfway business workflow, and past nan agents thrust connected apical of that. These agents would beryllium adjuvant pinch making decisions, automating workflows, or, essentially, conscionable accelerating immoderate process nan personification was trying to do successful nan system, nan exec said.

In addition, Levie pointed retired that this reconfiguration would dramatically effect nan business exemplary of endeavor SaaS.

“The point that I’m very convinced of is we’ll person astir 100 times more, possibly 1,000 times more, agents than we person people. So you’ll person measurement much users of that package system, aliases SaaS, arsenic agents,” Levie said.

As a result, nan emblematic “per-seat” business exemplary would nary longer work, and instead, companies would person to waste immoderate shape of depletion and volume-oriented usage cases pinch AI agents.

These changes are a marketplace opportunity for startups, peculiarly those that are building for nan agent-first era, alternatively than bigger companies that are trying to merge agents into existing processes.

Smaller startups, he said, person nary business processes to change, truthful they tin creation a caller process successful an agent-first way.

This presents an opportunity for startups to build solutions for nan endeavor abstraction to make nan alteration guidance process easier and much palatable, Levie said.

He encouraged entrepreneurs to capitalize connected this displacement by building.

“We are successful this model correct now that we person not been successful for astir 15 years, which is — there’s a complete level displacement happening successful tech that’s opening up a spot for a caller group of companies to emerge,” Levie said.

“And I would just, you know, effort and afloat utilization that.”