Aaron Levie's take on how AI moves the work goalposts — and what that means for jobs
You've probably heard about how many big company AI executives have been preaching gloom and doom when it comes to AI replacing jobs, but not everyone feels that way. Box CEO Aaron Levie thinks the math actually works in the favor of workers, and not just because it's good PR.
Speaking on the FastForward on PPN podcast last week, Levie said that he believes that as you expand the use of AI, it increases the amount of possible work you can get done, thereby continually expanding the work that needs to be done. What he means is that as agents become more capable, it actually raises the bar of what work is possible, shifting the momentum back to human workers. It becomes a virtuous cycle in which humans have to stay involved to ensure the AI fully understands the new tasks that have been created.
"AI will almost never generate something perfectly because what will happen is whatever we used to think was perfect, we will expand the definition in the future to the point where it's imperfect again, and then we are back to having additional work that we end up having to have oversight on."
When I interviewed Juniper CIO Sharon Mandell back in Fall 2024, she said something similar, and this was before agentic AI had entered the picture in a big way. As she saw it, AI made it possible to tackle tasks that had previously fallen off the to-do list because they were too expensive or you lacked the personnel to get them done.
"If this technology helps us push more of those things above the line at a reasonable cost, while taking tedious jobs away, it can free our people to work directly with our customers more," Mandell told me at the time.
A recent Goldman Sachs report has also found this to be true. "Goldman Sachs Research has shown that, while AI is replacing some workers, these job losses are being partially offset by rising employment where AI augments human workers and boosts their productivity," which is precisely what Levie and Mandell are suggesting. AI doesn't just replace work, it actually expands the overall amount of work, thereby creating more demand for employees, not less.
While it's suddenly becoming fashionable again to be bullish about AI and jobs, this isn't something that Levie just latched onto because it was popular or because his company is selling AI-infused products and services.
Levie sees agents being introduced into more workflows only amplifying that impact. "What I tend to see is that the work just expands based on the kind of tool capabilities that we have, and I've seen no evidence at any kind of macro scale where that doesn't happen," Levie said on the podcast.
The thing is that a lot of this is potential at this point. While AI is showing some progress, it's clear that many enterprises are still struggling to implement it at scale. Agents have to evolve far beyond their current capabilities, but Levie believes that's going to happen, just as he and his co-founders saw the future in the cloud early on, long before most others did. And while it took some time to get there, the industry eventually caught up with Box's vision, slowly at first, and then quite suddenly much faster. Levie sees AI following a similar arc.
"So I think we're in for some amount of diffusion where it will take some time for AI to hit most organizations, and we have to be prepared for what that looks like," he said.
