redwood city: Four years ago, when artificial intelligence started changing business, Box CEO Aaron Levie decided to adapt.
Box, a Silicon Valley company that makes software that stores and manages data, has begun incorporating AI into its products. We have started selling AI for the purpose of automating tasks such as reviewing and approving contracts. It asked employees to put aside their regular jobs and help other colleagues take advantage of AI.
That’s why Box appointed a new role last fall: Senior Director of AI, Data, and Integration. This was to help employees align internal systems and data to better leverage AI.
The job was one of 13 new roles Box created thanks to AI, with titles such as AI Architect, AI Solution Manager, and AI Platform Leader. With the surge in these positions, Box expects to have more than 3,000 employees by early next year, up from 2,900 at the beginning of this year.
“We’re also selling AI to our customers, so we’re actually having to hire more people,” Levie, 41, said. “And as AI users, we are gaining new forms of productivity that are also leading to hiring.”
Across the tech industry, companies like Meta and Coinbase are laying off employees in the name of AI. Many fear that powerful technologies that can generate code and answer questions will come to replace workers in jobs such as computer programming and engineering management.
But Box shows that AI has the potential to boost job creation and make working conditions more nuanced. For example, the explosion in AI-generated code that requires scrutiny is driving demand for cybersecurity experts soaring, while companies like Google are recruiting more engineers to help customers integrate AI into their systems.
These role increases are unlikely to offset AI-related headcount reductions. Stephen Meyer, a business strategy professor at Columbia Business School, said technology is still evolving and it’s unclear whether these jobs will be permanent or temporary and whether companies will be able to find workers with the right skills for the jobs.
But new technology has long created new jobs, he says. When computers arrived in the workplace in the 1970s and 1980s, information technology departments were born, and “now we have IT, we have chief information officers, and so on,” Meyer says. “It created a whole new job, a new business, a new degree.”
Mr. Levie helped found Box in 2005. The company’s software is often deployed behind the scenes, helping businesses store and manipulate documents and other data. The company has more than 100,000 customers, including federal agencies and Morgan Stanley, and went public in 2015.
Box typically takes a slow and steady approach to hiring. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company, like many in the tech industry, didn’t hire during the pandemic. From 2019 to 2022, the number of employees increased by 20% to approximately 2,500 people. Some of its peers, which have cut thousands of jobs in recent months, have doubled or tripled in size in recent years.
“We’ve never had any major layoffs, and that remains a major commitment for us,” said Jessica Swank, Box’s chief human resources officer.
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022 to spark an AI frenzy, Levie said he was excited about the power of the technology. Box has introduced AI into its software, adding the ability for the technology to perform tasks such as document creation.
This move is starting to bear fruit. Box sales rose 11% year-over-year in the company’s most recent quarter, the company announced in May, marking the highest growth since 2022. But concerns about whether AI will eventually replace Box’s software have weighed on the company, sending its stock down about 7% this year.
Levy said he believes companies will continue to buy software using AI rather than create their own because third-party software is likely to be more secure and reliable. Meanwhile, his company is investing in incorporating AI into its products.
Box is also investing in new jobs that it sees as long-term roles. As AI models advance, the way they answer questions and the structure may change, Levy says. That means Box customers will need help using the new model, he said.
“That’s kind of the question of when does AI slow down?” Levy said. “That will probably be the moment when employment is sustained in some way and reaches a plateau.”
Among the roles Box is adding is a “forward deployment engineer” who will help customers who want to use AI but don’t have the technical know-how. The other is an “AI Business Automation Engineer,” a member of the IT department who helps colleagues use AI to increase productivity and eliminate drudgery.
The company said the pace of hiring software engineers has not slowed, even as AI coding capabilities improve. With the advent of AI agents that can perform tasks autonomously, software engineers can now manage them and accomplish things that once required a team of engineers, Levie said. This means that each additional engineer contributes more, making it even more valuable to hire, he said.
“The additional roles we’re adding are core engineering,” Levy said. “Now we can basically build more functionality for our customers, and actually having more engineers to do that is attractive to us.”
Levy said the productivity gains from AI have allowed Box to justify hiring talent it previously couldn’t hire. He said the company hired employees to market to specific industries, something it couldn’t do before because the operations required too many workers. However, AI has made this task more efficient and possible.
“Now we’re hiring one or two people to do the work of 10 people because we can finally afford to do that work,” Levy said. – ©2026 The New York Times Company
This article was originally published in The New York Times.
