The Agent Era: Building Software Beyond Chat with Box CEO Aaron Levie

“So that trend is happening, which is we spend as much time now thinking about the agent interface to our tool as we do the human interface. And the reason we're doing that is because our hypothesis would be that if you have a hundred or a thousand times more agents than people, then your software has to be built for agents. And then what is the way that those agents are going to interact with your system? It's going to be through an API or a CLI or MCP or whatever.”

“The question for every software company is no longer whether to support agents, but what it means when agents outnumber employees a thousand to one. I speak with Aaron Levie, CEO at Box, alongside a16z board partner, Steve Sinofsky, and a16z general partner, Martin Casado. Agents do not want simpler systems, they want better ones. They choose backends based on durability, cost parameters and reliability, not interface polish.”

“Well, then you're basically just developing the next abstraction layer for how people interact. And developing an abstraction layer has historically at each level of the abstraction layer been a highly skilled, very specific individual within an organization developing that. And then the little parts that they build just become little toolets in the world of people doing particular tasks. And some people are able to stitch them together and some can't.”

“I think it's very tempting to be like, these agents are going to code and do X. But I think we're going the opposite way. So I think actually where we started was, we'd take a piece of SaaS software and we'd add AI. Then that's the new AI enabled. But now what are we actually doing? We're like, okay, the SaaS software is still SaaS software, and the agent uses it as a computer because it's actually very good at that.”

“The diffusion of AI capability is going to take longer than people in Silicon Valley realize. It's just absurd to think you're going to 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 going to be the most wild one in the next couple of years.”