The Agent Era: Building Software Beyond Chat with Box CEO Aaron Levie
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The diffusion of AI capability is gonna take longer than people in Silicon Valley realize. It's just absurd to think you're gonna vibe code your way to, like, SAP. All of that domain knowledge, it's
not just represented in some well orchestrated data layer. The engineering compute budget conversation is gonna be the most wild one in the next couple of years.
The biggest problem right now is everybody is trying to figure out the economics of all of this. Yes. When they're off by at least an order of magnitude on how big the opportunity is.
Uh-huh. If you have a 100 or a thousand times more agents than people, then your software has to be built for agents.
People in the abstract say things like, now you're marketing to agents that you're like an API, you've got a good idea. I actually think that's almost exactly wrong, which is Wow.
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Every major technology wave promised to eliminate the middleman. Marketplaces would dismantle hotels. SaaS would replace on premise. But the taxi medallion was the only real casualty. The layers persisted because they encoded organizational logic, not just software logic. Now agents are arriving, and the assumption is the same: They will flatten everything. But the first enterprise teams deploying agents at scale are discovering something different. Agents do not want simpler systems. They want better ones. They choose back ends based on durability, cost parameters, and reliability, not interf
If you start to imagine that we all have to build software for agents? I think we're, like, all clear on that. Right? So, like, that trend is happening, which is, like, we spend as much time now thinking about the agent interface to our tool as we do the
human database. Sure. Okay.
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