A leading enterprise software CEO says companies are underestimating the potential of AI agents, noting that executives are thinking too small.
In a new post on X, Box CEO Aaron Levie says corporate AI adoption is entering a more expansive phase, with agents poised to unlock workflows that would have been impossible due to cost, scale or labor limits.
“Most of the world hasn’t quite caught on to this point yet. We imagine AI as dropping into today’s workflows and just taking what we already do and making it more efficient by 20% or something. Yet most companies realize that most of the time they’re doing far less than they could because of the cost or limited capacity of talent.”
While he notes that firms are using AI agents to increase workflow efficiency, Levie says the technology will eventually be used to tackle dormant opportunities rather than shaving costs on existing processes.
“Five years from now, probably 95% of the tokens used by AI agents will be used on tasks that humans never did before… In real estate, it’s ideas like being able to read and analyze every lease agreement for every trend and business opportunity possible. In life sciences, it’s being able to rapidly do drug discovery or improve quality by looking through errors in data. In financial services, it’s being able to look through all past deals and figure out better future monetization. In legal, it’s being able to execute on contracts or legal work for previously unprofitable segments or projects.”
Levie highlights that the real breakthrough for businesses lies in work that never existed — not replacing headcount in work that already does.
“If you are working on AI agents right now, the big opportunity is to bring enterprises ‘work’ for problems that they couldn’t do before because it was nearly impossible to afford or scale. And if you’re deploying AI agents in an enterprise, consider what things you’d do more of (or differently) if the cost and speed of labor became 100X cheaper and faster. This is going to get you the real upside of automation.”
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