Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie doesn’t think AI agents will replace enterprise SaaS (software-as-a-service) companies. Rather, he believes the more likely future is a hybrid combination of SaaS and agents, he said, speaking on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference on Wednesday.
“Typically, once you create a business process, you want to be able to effectively define that process in business logic with a deterministic system, because there is a very high risk that that process will change on the same day,” Levie explained.
“If you’re doing something mission-critical, we’ve already seen great examples where data is leaked because of an agent, or the agent leaves and corrupts the database, or something unexpected happens in production. So there needs to be some kind of ‘church and state’ between the deterministic and non-deterministic sides of the software.”
He painted a picture of the future of enterprise software, where SaaS is used for core business workflows and agents sit on top of it. These agents will help make decisions, automate workflows, or essentially accelerate whatever process the person was trying to do within the system, executives said.
Furthermore, Levie pointed out that this reconfiguration will have a dramatic impact on enterprise SaaS business models.
“What I’m very confident about is that we’re going to have about 100 times more agents than employees, probably 1,000 times more, so we’re going to have far more users of that software system (SaaS) as agents,” Levie said.
As a result, the typical “per seat” business model no longer works, and instead companies must use AI agents to sell some form of consumption-driven use case.
These changes represent a market opportunity, especially for startups building for the agent-first era, rather than large enterprises looking to integrate agents into existing processes.
He said small startups don’t have business processes to change, so they can design new processes in an agent-first manner.
Levy said this is an opportunity for startups to build enterprise solutions that make the change management process easier and more comfortable.
He encouraged entrepreneurs to take advantage of this change by building.
“We’re at this point now, for the first time in about 15 years, where there’s a complete platform shift happening in the technology industry, opening up space for new companies to emerge,” Levy said.
“And I’m going to try and make the most of it.”
