Box CEO Aaron Levie on how AI is changing the enterprise SaaS landscape

Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levy doesn’t believe AI agents will replace SaaS (software as a service) companies. Instead, he believes the more likely future is a hybrid mix of SaaS plus agents, he said, speaking on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference on Wednesday.

“In general, once you have a business process, you want to be able to define that effectively, through business logic using deterministic systems — just because the risk of that changing on any given day is very high,” Levy explained.

“If you’re doing something critical – we’ve already seen great examples of either data leaking due to customers, or a customer going, you know, maybe blowing up your database or doing something in production that you didn’t expect. So you want to have a kind of ‘church and state’ between the deterministic side of your software and the non-deterministic side.”

He painted a picture of the future of enterprise software where SaaS is used in core business workflows, and then agents ride on top of that. These agents would be useful in making decisions, automating workflows, or, basically, just speeding up whatever process a person was trying to do in the system, the executive said.

Additionally, Levy noted that this reconfiguration will significantly impact the enterprise SaaS business model.

“The thing I’m very convinced about is that we’re going to have about 100 times more agents, maybe 1,000 times more people than we have. So, you’re going to have a lot more users of this software system, or SaaS, as agents,” Levy said.

As a result, the typical “per seat” business model will not work, and instead, companies will have to sell some form of consumption and volume-oriented use cases with AI agents.

These changes represent a market opportunity for startups, especially those working to create an agent-first era, rather than larger companies trying to integrate agents into existing operations.

Small startups don’t have business processes to change, so they can design a new process in an agent-first manner, he said.

This represents an opportunity for startups to build solutions for the enterprise space to make the change management process easier and more palatable, Levy said.

He encouraged businessmen to take advantage of this transformation through construction.

“We’re in this window now that we haven’t been in for about 15 years, which is — there’s a complete platform shift happening in technology that’s opening up a place for a new set of companies to emerge,” Levy said.

“And I’m just going to try to, you know, take full advantage of that.”