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

**Aaron Levie** (0:00)
The diffusion of AI capability is going to take longer than people in Silicon Valley realize.

**Steve Sinofsky** (0:04)
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.

**Aaron Levie** (0:13)
The engineering compute budget conversation is going to be the most wild one in the next couple of years.

**Steve Sinofsky** (0:19)
The biggest problem right now is everybody is trying to figure out the economics of all of this. When they're off by at least an order of magnitude on how big the opportunity is.

**Aaron Levie** (0:29)
If you have 100 or 1000 times more agents than people, then your software has to be built for agents.

**Martin Casado** (0:33)
People in the abstract say things like, now you're marketing to agents, you're like an API, you've got a good idea. I actually think that's almost exactly wrong.

**Aaron Levie** (0:41)
Wow, this is breaking podcast news.

**Erik Torenberg** (0:44)
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 backends based on durability, cost parameters and reliability, not interface polish.
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.

**Aaron Levie** (1:48)
Do you start to imagine that we all have to build software for agents? I think we're all clear on that, right?
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. Sure. Okay. 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. And the paradigm that appears to be taking off and is quite successful so far in terms of efficacy is what if you give a coding agent access to your SaaS tools and a coding agent access to your knowledge, work, sort of workflows and context. And that kind of becomes the superpower, which is the agent is not only capable of reading some data, understanding some information, it can actually code its way or use APIs through whatever task it's trying to achieve.
That appears to be like a paradigm that is starting to compound. And that's the Claude Cowork phenomenon, that's the whatever OpenAI is kind of cooking up with the super app, perplexity computer, etc. And I actually think it kind of makes sense as like the ultimate manifestation of this stuff.

**Steve Sinofsky** (3:04)
I mean, I think you're right. It makes sense in a theoretical way. But in a practical way, we have to be really careful in that the way to say it is algorithmic thinking is really, really, really hard for the vast majority of people who have jobs.
And so the easiest way to think about it is if you were to go into any person and ask them to create a flowchart for a particular thing that they have to go do, they would probably fail at producing that flowchart. So within any organization, say, doing a marketing plan and there's 50 marketing people working on a giant product line, one person probably understands and could document the flowchart.

**Aaron Levie** (3:44)
100 percent.

**Steve Sinofsky** (3:45)
So if you put one of these agents or you put this tool, this co-working tool in front of people to create these things, their ability to explain to it what to do is really, really limited.

**Aaron Levie** (3:58)
100 percent. But what if that becomes the new, this is the new way you have to interface with computers, and you just have to cycle that through?

**Steve Sinofsky** (4:05)
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. But that happened with paper clips and thumbtacks before. And I think it's going to happen with whatever we do next.