Box CEO Aaron Levie on how AI is changing the enterprise SaaS landscape
Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie doesn’t think AI agents will replace enterprise SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies. Instead, he believes the most likely future is a hybrid combination of SaaS plus agents, he said on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference on Wednesday.
“In general, once you have a business process, you want to be able to effectively define it in business logic with deterministic systems – just because the risk of that changing on any given day is very high,” Levie explains.
“If you’re doing something mission-critical, we’ve seen great examples of data being leaked because of agents, or an agent blowing up your database or doing something in production that you didn’t expect. So you want to have some kind of ‘church and state’ between the deterministic side of your software and the non-deterministic side.”
He painted a picture of a future of enterprise software where the SaaS is used for the core workflow of the business, and where the agents come on top. These agents would be helpful in making decisions, automating workflows, or, essentially, speeding up whatever process the person was trying to perform in the system, the director said.
Furthermore, Levie pointed out that this reconfiguration would have a dramatic impact on the enterprise SaaS business model.
“What I’m very confident about is that we’re going to have about 100 times more, maybe 1,000 times more agents than people. So you’re going to have a lot more users of that software system, or SaaS, as agents,” Levie said.
As a result, the typical “per-seat” business model would no longer work, and instead companies would have to sell some form of consumption and volume-oriented use cases with AI agents.
These changes represent a market opportunity for startups, especially those preparing for the agent-first era, rather than for larger companies trying to integrate agents into existing processes.
Smaller startups, he said, don’t need to change business processes, so they can design a new process in an agent-first way.
This gives startups the opportunity to build solutions for the enterprise space to make the change management process easier and more enjoyable, Levie said.
He encouraged entrepreneurs to take advantage of this shift by building.
“We’re now in a period we haven’t been in for 15 years, which means there’s a complete platform shift in technology that’s opening up a space for a new group of companies,” says Levie.
“And I would just, you know, try to take full advantage of that.”
