By Jeffrey Dastin and Max A. Cherney
NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO, April 27 (Reuters) – Box is launching a service built for artificial intelligence to expedite tedious work, like processing millions of invoices and pulling data from corporate documents, CEO Aaron Levie told Reuters on Monday.
In an interview at Reuters’ Momentum AI summit in New York, Levie said the company would launch the service, called Box Automate, on Tuesday. It builds on other AI programs that Box developed to put enterprises’ vast and disorganized data to use.
Box Automate lets a customer specify how AI agents – programs that perform tasks with minimal direction – can plug in to business processes like invoice management. The software can have an AI agent handle grunt work, pull crucial data from “every one of those invoices,” and set up a quick decision for an employee to review, Levie said.
The software will come with most of Box’s enterprise product plans, he said. It also has the potential to upsell customers to Box’s Enterprise Advanced tier, which lets them build agents powering this automation.
“We are trying to balance how to make this as available as possible,” with “definitely trying to make more money,” Levie said.
BOX PUSHES FORWARD ON AI
Box, which Levie co-founded more than two decades ago while in college, has lately been remaking its cloud services to revolve around AI in order to win business and stave off disruption.
The Redwood City, California-based company is navigating a crowded marketplace for cloud computing, with a focus on business customers and on making AI from other developers, including Anthropic and OpenAI, achieve better results with their Box-stored content.
It has faced some market skepticism. Box’s shares are down more than 16% so far this year as investors expected various software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers to be swept away by the enterprise drive of Anthropic in particular.
Levie is unfazed. In his view, most companies would not waste their scarce resources aiming to replicate what SaaS providers built over years, or ask the likes of ChatGPT to do so, in a practice called vibe coding.
“You’re not going to vibe-code an ERP system,” Levie said. “I don’t think you’re going to vibe-code a CRM system. The risk is simply too high.”
RUNNING UP BILLS FROM AI
Asked what his board of directors wanted to see from Box on the AI front, Levie said, “Probably more, more, more.”
A challenge that Levie likened to a “sort of schizophrenia” is that boards and C-suite officers are pushing for still greater AI adoption, then immediately questioning the investment return and saying, “I can’t believe you just spent that much money on that thing.”
The majority of Box’s software is now written by AI, Levie said.
But costs are not necessarily what is preventing Box from reaching 100%. While some startups may boast that they forgo code review and have numerous agents handling their work, the risk that AI messes up – mistakenly deleting a database, for instance – is too great when Box serves some of the world’s biggest institutions, Levie said. “We can’t afford to do that type of execution.”
Still, Levie himself has tried his hand at AI coding, sending staff examples of what he built and questioning them on their deliberative pace, he said.
The takeaway was not that Levie is looking to trade his CEO job for one in engineering, but that learning how AI works is key for any executive, he said.
“There’s a journey that you go on … You use AI a little bit, and you’re like, ‘Oh my God. It’s going to automate the entire business.'”
“And then you use AI a lot, and you’re like, ‘Oh my god, we need humans for almost every'” part of the business, he said.
(Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Francisco and Jeffrey Dastin in New York; Editing by Kenneth Li and Matthew Lewis)
Comments