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Aaron Levie, co-founder & CEO, Box In a recent conversation, he shared some of his thoughts on the wave of change that artificial intelligence (AI) is bringing to the enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketplace. He was critical of the idea that these AI agents will fully replace the go-to market model of legacy enterprise SaaS companies. Instead, Levie suggested that smaller startups with less codified business processes are able to create new models.
Levie remarked, “Generally, once you have a business process, you want to be able to define that in, effectively, business logic with deterministic systems — just because the risk of that changing any given day is very high.” He believes that for more agile startups, there is potential to design business processes from the ground up using an agent-first approach. Fast forward to today, and this flexibility is what enables them to pivot quickly to new technologies and market demands.
To achieve such success stories, the CEO stressed the importance of addressing risks when incorporating AI into essential business processes. First, he pointed out that we’ve already had experiences where AI agents have threatened data integrity. In these instances, unexpected and unplanned actions threw a wrench into operations. Levie warned the audience not to mix the line of deterministic software with non-deterministic AI features.
If you’re developing something mission critical, do so at your own risk. As you know, we have seen some pretty scary scenarios where data was leaked by an agent or an agent inadvertently corrupted your database in production. He stated, “So you want to have some sort of ‘church and state’ between the deterministic side of your software and the non-deterministic side.”
Levie thinks that the technological landscape today is just right for such a change. He observed that “we are in this window right now that we have not been in for about fifteen years, which is — there’s a complete platform shift happening in tech that’s opening up a spot for a new set of companies to emerge.” He challenged startups to seed this new industry and urged them to grasp the opportunity of this pivotal time in history.
Beyond that, he estimates that there will be between three to five times as many AI agents as human users. “The thing that I’m very convinced of is we’ll have about 100 times more, maybe 1,000 times more, agents than we have people,” Levie stated. “So you’ll have way more users of that software system, or SaaS, as agents.”