A top enterprise software executive says AI agents will raise performance standards across industries, turning routine roles into higher-skill positions rather than eliminating them.
In a new thread on X, Box CEO Aaron Levie says fears of mass white-collar displacement misunderstand the real shift underway, pointing to historical cycles where technology redefined jobs rather than wiping them out.
He believes AI is a force that expands expectations rather than compressing opportunity, with enterprise software poised to benefit from rising productivity demands.
“AI will largely automate tasks, not jobs. Even as AI agents get better at automating more of what we define as a job in a particular field, we will just raise the bar for what the job is. Ultimately, today’s jobs are tomorrow’s tasks.”
Levie points to decades of workflow evolution as precedent, describing a pattern where automation eliminates narrow duties and pushes workers into higher-value roles supported by technology.
“Today, many things that we consider as tasks were entire jobs in the past. Telephone operators, telegram clerks, message runners, bookkeepers, typists, and on and on. But then we used technology to digitize and automate parts of the work, and then expanded the scope of the job requirement.
AI agents will cause us to just constantly expand the expectation level of what work output looks like in a particular field.”
Looking at the software-as-a-service (SaaS) segment, Levie believes that the use of enterprise software will grow, countering predictions that automation could make corporate tools less necessary.
“The fear was that AI agents would somehow compress the role of enterprise software.
Generally, the opposite will be true, assuming the software company executes effectively (either startups or existing players). Enterprise software that brings along useful work will make organizations more productive, encouraging more use of the software overall for either the people or agents.
The biggest benefit is that now SaaS products, which were once capped by the existing number of users that could utilize the tool, now have uncapped upside in the form of consumption with agents.”
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