At Box, we are focused on building an AI-first company. We are looking through every part of our operations, strategy, and product to ensure it's been reimagined for an AI-first world. We're already seeing endless examples as a company where AI is helping us get better insights, jump many steps ahead in a project, onboard new employees quicker, execute on products faster, and more. The essence of what we want to use AI for is to move faster, to make better decisions, and ultimately drive increased competitive advantage for Box. We want to use AI to accelerate the business into the future, not just use it to save money. In general, as you'll see in our core principles, almost anywhere we can save money using AI, we want to reinvest back into the business to drive more growth in strategic areas. As we continue to build an AI-first company, here are a few of the core principles we will operate with: • Primarily use AI to eliminate drudgery and move faster across the business (e.g., faster onboarding of new employees, idea iteration, product delivery, serving customers) • Encourage teams to use AI to automate more and save money, but primarily re-invest those savings back into the same org to work on more strategic work (“keep what you kill”) • Pick common platforms (e.g., Box AI for corporate knowledge) across the company, as well as core platforms per function (e.g., AI Agents for coding, sales) • Drive constant experimentation internally to find the best use-cases for AI, and encourage teams to share those (e.g., internal all-hands meetings, team sharing) • Upskill every employee to be AI-first over time with more education and awareness • Strong data governance and security principles in place, with human-in-the-loop still required for most areas (though this will naturally change as AI Agents mature) We'll continue to share more about our AI journey as we go, but those are just a few things that we're living by as we scale.
Aaron Levie, Love these principles, curious to learn the inside process for how you and the box team curated and finalized this list? and how are you measuring and governing this list?
Love this! Timely since I had recently posted being curious about what companies were doing to be truly AI-first (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shivmahajan_ai-leadership-futureofwork-activity-7323044810666258434-33UV?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAKR9_cBtLssYi3VukaBgAa5Ta_TaWTLLUI). I think this is exactly the types of operating principles that will make or break companies in their endeavors to harness the power of AI. Good luck, Aaron Levie!
I like these principles. Mistakes will be made in picking platforms and applying AI. But the principles remain constant. The focus is on moving the business faster, making processes better, reusing what works, and keeping human oversight over AI use cases. Bravo, Aaron Levie.
It’s only a matter of time where every company will follow this model.
Aaron Levie can you elaborate on the kind of AI Upskilling that is being provided to folks at Box?
Love it
Good stuff Aaron Levie. For the last 2 years it feels, Box truly embraced this ethos. Before many others.
I really like these principles - and I applaud Aaron Levie for leading the way on this How do you plan to measure this though? What does this look like in practice?
So, Box is #3 of the companies in the past two weeks to say they are AI first, but Box also is selling an AI product (expected!). Differences here - I don't see that AI use is required or on performance reviews, though that was an explicit callout of Shopify and maybe Duolingo. And I do see a huge difference in "keep what you kill". If you save money by eliminating toil, you keep the budget in that org to work on better things. This would encourage everyone to be out of the box (sorry) thinkers as the incentives are aligned. Neat!
CTO & Co-Founder @ Glanceable | Next Generation AI-Powered Customer Analytics | Winner LVMH Innovation Award 2024 & Stellantis Venture Awards 2024
3moLove seeing more companies go AI-first, Shopify, Duolingo, and now Box. It’s an exciting shift. Always happy to share how we’re helping teams apply AI to customer feedback at scale.