NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO, April 27: Box is launching a service built for artificial intelligence to streamline tedious tasks such as processing millions of invoices and extracting data from corporate documents, CEO Aaron Levy told Reuters on Monday.
In an interview at Reuters’ Momentum AI Summit in New York, Levy said the company will launch a service called Box Automate on Tuesday. It builds on other AI programs Box has developed to take advantage of enterprises’ vast and chaotic data.
Box Automate allows customers to specify how AI agents (programs that perform tasks with minimal instructions) can connect to business processes such as invoice management. The software allows AI agents to handle the grunt work, pull critical data from “every bill,” and set up quick decisions that employees can review, Levy said.
He said the software will be included with most of Box’s enterprise product plans. We also have the potential to upsell customers to Box’s Enterprise Advanced tier, which allows them to build agents that power this automation.
“We’re trying to balance how we can make this as available as possible with “definitely trying to make more revenue,” Levy said.
Box powers AI
Box, which Levy co-founded more than 20 years ago as a student, has recently been reinventing its cloud services around AI to win business and prevent disruption.
The Redwood City, Calif.-based company is navigating the crowded market for cloud computing with a focus on enabling AI from enterprise customers and other developers like Anthropic and OpenAI to achieve better results with content stored on Box.
There is some skepticism in the market. Box’s stock has fallen more than 16% so far this year, as investors expect various software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers to be swept away by Anthropic’s enterprise focus in particular.
Levi doesn’t move. In his view, most companies won’t waste scarce resources trying to replicate what SaaS providers have spent years building, or ask companies like ChatGPT to do it for them using a technique known as vibecoding.
“We’re not going to vibecode an ERP system,” Levie says. “I don’t think you’re going to vibecode your CRM system. It’s simply too risky.”
Create invoices with AI
Asked what the board wants from Box in terms of AI, Levy said, “Probably more, more, more.”
The challenge, which Levie likens to “a kind of schizophrenia,” is that even as boards and executives push for more AI adoption, they quickly question the return on investment and say, “I can’t believe we spent that much money on something like that.”
Currently, most of Box’s software is written by AI, Levy said.
But cost isn’t necessarily what keeps Box from reaching 100%. While some startups may brag about skipping code reviews and relying on many agents to do the work, Levy said that when Box serves some of the world’s largest institutions, the risk of AI messing up (for example, accidentally deleting a database) is too great. “We cannot afford such executions.”
Still, Levy himself tried his hand at AI coding, sending his staff samples he had built and asking them about the pace of their deliberations.
The point, he said, is not that Levy is trying to replace the CEO job with an engineering job, but that learning how AI works is important for any executive.
“There’s a journey that you go through…with a little bit of AI, you think, ‘Oh my gosh, my whole business is going to be automated.'”
“And when you use AI a lot, you say, ‘Oh my gosh, we need humans in almost every part,'” he said.
