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

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

“Typically, once you have a business process, you want to be able to define it, functionally, with deterministic systems in the business logic—just because the risk of change on any given day is so high,” Levy explained.

“If you’re doing something mission critical—we’ve already seen great examples of data leaks due to agents, or an agent going in and, you know, maybe blowing up your database or doing something you didn’t expect. So you want to put some sort of ‘church and state’ between the deterministic side of your software and the non-deterrent side.”

He paints a picture of the future of enterprise software where SaaS is used for core business workflows and then agents ride on top of it. These agents will be helpful in making decisions, automating workflows or, essentially, speeding up the process that the person was trying to do in the system, the executive said.

Additionally, Levie noted that this realignment will dramatically affect the business model of enterprise SaaS.

“What I strongly believe is that we’re going to have about 100 times more, maybe 1,000 times more, agents than people. So you’ll have more users as agents in that software system or SaaS,” Levy said.

As a result, the typical “per-seat” business model will no longer work, and instead, companies will need to sell AI agents for certain use cases and volume-based use cases.

These changes are a market opportunity for startups, especially those building for the agent-first era, rather than larger companies trying to integrate agents into existing processes.

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

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

He encourages entrepreneurs to capitalize on this shift.

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

“And I’m just going to, you know, try and fully absorb.”