Every Agent Needs a Box — Aaron Levie, Box

**Aaron Levie** (0:00)
Like, you don't write code, you talk to an agent, and it goes and does it for you, and you maybe at best review it. That's even probably like, like largely not even what you're doing. What's happening is we are changing our work to make the agents effective in that model. The agent didn't really adapt to how we work. We basically adapted to how the agent works. All of the economy has to go through that exact same evolution. Right now, it's a huge asset and an advantage for the teams that do it early, and that are kind of wired into doing this, because you'll see compounding returns. But that's just going to take a while for most companies to actually go and get this deployed.

**swyx** (0:37)
Welcome to the Lane Space Pod. We're back in the Chroma Studio with Chroma CEO, Jeff Huber. Welcome, returning guest, but now guest host. It's a pleasure.

**Aaron Levie** (0:45)
Wow, how'd you get upgraded to that?

**swyx** (0:48)
Because he's like the perfect guy to be guest host for you.

**Aaron Levie** (0:51)
That makes sense, actually. We love context. We both really love context.

**swyx** (0:54)
We really do. And we're here with Aaron Levie. Welcome. Thank you.

**Aaron Levie** (0:59)
Good to be here.

**swyx** (1:01)
Yeah, so we've all met offline and chatted a little bit, but it's always nice to get these things in person in conversation. You just started off with so much energy. You're super excited about agents.

**Aaron Levie** (1:10)
I love agents.

**swyx** (1:11)
Yeah. Open Claw just got bought by OpenAI. Not bought, but you know what I mean.

**Aaron Levie** (1:17)
Some, you know, aqua hire-y...

**Jeff Huber** (1:19)
Executive hire.

**Aaron Levie** (1:20)
Executive hire.

**swyx** (1:20)
Executive hire. Hey, that's my term. Okay. What are you pounding the table on on agents? You have so many insightful tweets.

**Aaron Levie** (1:29)
Well, the thing that we get super excited about that I think is probably, you know, should be relatively obvious is we've built a platform to help enterprises manage their files and their corporate files and the permissions of who has access to those files and the sharing and collaboration of those files. And all those files contain really, really important information for the enterprise. It might have your contracts. It might have your research materials. It might have marketing information. It might have your memos. All that data obviously has, you know, predominantly been used by humans. But there's been one really interesting problem, which is that, you know, humans only really work with their files during an active engagement with them. And they kind of go away and you don't really see them for a long time. And all of a sudden, with the power of AI and AI agents, all of that data becomes extremely relevant as this ongoing source of answers to new questions, of data that will transform into something else that produces value in your organization. It contains the answer to the new employee that's onboarding that needs to ramp up on a project.
It contains the answer to the right thing to sell a customer when you're having a conversation with them. It contains the roadmap information that's going to produce the next feature. So all of that data that previously we've been just sort of storing and occasionally forgetting about because we're only working on the new active stuff, all of that information becomes valuable to the enterprise. And it's going to become extremely valuable to end users because now they can have agents go find what they're looking for and produce new value and new data on that information. And it's going to become incredibly valuable to agents because agents can roam around and do a bunch of work and they're going to need access to that data as well.
And, you know, sometimes that will be an agent that is sort of working on behalf of you and effectively as you and they are kind of accessing all of the same information that you have access to and operating as you in the system. And then sometimes there's going to be agents that are just effectively autonomous and kind of run on their own and you're going to collaborate and work with them kind of like you did another person. Open Claw being the most recent and maybe first real sort of, you know, kind of, you know, updating everybody's, you know, views of this landscape version of what that could look like, which is, okay, I have an agent, it's on its own system, it's on its own computer, it has access to its own tools. I probably don't give it access to my entire life. I probably communicate with it like I would an assistant or a colleague and then it sort of has this sandbox environment. So all of that has massive implications for a platform that manages enterprise data. We think it's going to just transform how we work with all of the enterprise content that we work with. And we just have to make sure we're building the right platform to support that.