Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie doesn’t think AI agents will replace enterprise SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies. Instead, he believes that the more likely future is a hybrid combination of SaaS plus agents, he said, speaking onstage at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference on Wednesday.
“Generally, once you have a business process, you want to be able to define that in, effectively, business logic with deterministic systems — just because the risk of that changing any given day is very high,” explained Levie.
“If you’re doing something mission critical — we’ve already seen great examples of either data being leaked because of agents, or an agent going and, you know, maybe blowing up your database or doing something in production you didn’t expect. So you want to have some sort of ‘church and state’ between the deterministic side of your software and the non-deterministic side.”
He painted a picture of a future of enterprise software where the SaaS is used for the core business workflow, and then the agents ride on top of that. These agents would be helpful with making decisions, automating workflows, or, essentially, just accelerating whatever process the person was trying to do in the system, the exec said.
In addition, Levie pointed out that this reconfiguration would dramatically impact the business model of enterprise SaaS.
“The thing that I’m very convinced of is we’ll have about 100 times more, maybe 1,000 times more, agents than we have people. So you’ll have way more users of that software system, or SaaS, as agents,” Levie said.
As a result, the typical “per-seat” business model would no longer work, and instead, companies would have to sell some form of consumption and volume-oriented use cases with AI agents.
These changes are a market opportunity for startups, particularly those that are building for the agent-first era, rather than bigger companies that are trying to integrate agents into existing processes.
Smaller startups, he said, have no business processes to change, so they can design a new process in an agent-first way.
This presents an opportunity for startups to build solutions for the enterprise space to make the change management process easier and more palatable, Levie said.
He encouraged entrepreneurs to capitalize on this shift by building.
“We are in this window right now that we have not been in for about 15 years, which is — there’s a complete platform shift happening in tech that’s opening up a spot for a new set of companies to emerge,” Levie said.
“And I would just, you know, try and fully exploit that.”