Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie doesn’t think AI agents will replace SaaS (software as a service) companies. Instead, he believes the most likely future is a hybrid combination of SaaS plus agents, he said, speaking on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference on Wednesday.
“Generally, once you have a business process, you want to be able to define it in, effectively, business logic with deterministic systems – precisely because the risk of that changing every day is very high,” Levie explained.
“If you’re doing something critical — we’ve already seen great examples of either data leakage due to agents, or an agent that goes and, you know, can blow up your database or do something in production that 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 the future of enterprise software where SaaS is used for core business workflow and then agents drive on top of it. These agents would be useful in making decisions, automating workflows or essentially speeding up any process the person was trying to do in the system, the executive said.
In addition, Levie pointed out that this restructuring will dramatically affect the enterprise’s SaaS business model.
“The thing I’m very confident about is that we’re going to have about 100 times more, maybe 1,000 times more, agents than we have people. So you’re going to have a lot 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 case with AI agents.
These changes are a market opportunity for startups, particularly those building for the agent-first era, rather than larger companies trying to integrate agents into existing processes.
Smaller startups, he said, don’t have business processes to change, so they can design a new process in an agent-first way.
This provides an opportunity for startups to create solutions for the enterprise space to make the change management process easier and more enjoyable, Levie said.
He encouraged entrepreneurs to take advantage of this shift by building.
“We’re in this window right now where we haven’t been here for about 15 years, which is — there’s a complete platform change happening in technology that opens up a point for a new set of companies to emerge,” Levie said.
“And I would just, you know, try to take full advantage of it.”
