How did we go from generating LinkedIn posts to onboarding AI Workers? Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, joins us to discuss the AI Workforce and what's next in the workplace.
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I had welcome everyone.
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I'm pleased to kick off the AI workforce summit
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with a very special guest.
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Aaron Levy is here, the co-founder and CEO of Box.
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Aaron, welcome to the program.
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Thanks for having me, Greg.
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So, you know, we've both been in the industry
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for quite a while.
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We were part of ushering in the cloud in the mid-2000s
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when you were starting Box.
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It was a new bottle for enterprise software.
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It was a huge platform shift.
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But this is perhaps the biggest thing we've seen yet.
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You know, Jen AI burst onto the scene 18 months ago.
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And for us as software professionals,
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we were discussing like,
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what's the impact on enterprise software?
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2023 kind of became the year of the AI co-pilot.
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Everybody kind of announcing these features
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right along the software writing shotgun
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with the human workforce,
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making them more productive.
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But 2024 is really the year that AI worker,
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software that can accomplish the jobs of, you know,
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of humans or tasks.
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And it's really caused us to think, you know,
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what is the future?
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So, first question for you,
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when did you see this trend emerging?
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And what's making you so excited about its impact
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on the industry?
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>> Yeah, so I mean, realistically,
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probably started seeing it at the, you know,
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second half of last year.
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And I think you captured the timeline really well.
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If I sort of even zoom out a little bit,
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I think for about a decade,
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we were talking about AI models.
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And AI models being able to do very discreet,
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you know, kind of single tasks,
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label this image, auto-complete a sentence,
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you know, the GPT-2, GPT-E, early GPT-3 era.
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Then obviously with chat GPT,
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we got the initial inklings of kind of AI assistants
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where I'd communicate back and forth
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in an ongoing dialogue,
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or you'd have a kind of a co-pilot-esque dynamic
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where it's sort of, you know,
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sitting alongside me, helping again,
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still auto-complete, auto-completion type tasks.
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But what I think, you know,
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the ecosystem eventually figured out,
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you guys include it is, is wait a second,
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if we don't just use the AI model as,
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as really a kind of a database
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where you're asking the question, getting an answer back,
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but instead really a reasoning engine,
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or almost a brain,
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and we're giving it and feeding it possible,
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not only tasks, but information and tools that it can use,
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well, all of a sudden,
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you can actually turn these things into agents.
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And so we've kind of gone from AI models
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to AI assistants to now AI agents.
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And we are, you know, quite literally in, you know,
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day one of that.
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I think the actual agents at scale in the world right now
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is, you know, is probably measured by a very,
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very low number.
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But I think in three or five or 10 years from now,
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we'll look back and realize this was the start of a,
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of a new wave of software where actually, you know,
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software is kind of providing work alongside it
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as opposed to, you know,
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just helping answer questions
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or helping enable you to do work.
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It's actually gonna deliver labor itself
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inside the software.
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So you're, you're right.
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You're spot on.
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We are in day one.
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I think companies are first,
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they're starting to see what AI can do for tech support.
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They're starting to see what AI can do for frontline sales reps
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or paralegals or recruiters or content producers.
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And it's kind of bending all of our minds,
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but kind of going back to the cloud
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and this last major tectonic shift
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that you were part of,
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given your experience kind of ushering companies
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through that mega change.
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How do you think this AI worker,
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AI agent movement is gonna play out?
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Like what similarities or differences do you see to the cloud?
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>> Yeah, I think, and this is probably a liability,
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but I do tend to think about patterns
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through just a kind of clay,
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Christensen-esque dynamic of blowing disruption,
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which is there's a new technology.
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It's bad at some things.
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It's good at other things.
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You know, what is the axis in which that,
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that technology is really good.
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And performance better.
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And then which axis is it performing worse at?
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And will that axis improve over time?
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And so you kind of look at, let's say,
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let's say cloud as an analogy,
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cloud, you know, when it first emerged,
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let's not even say SaaS,
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let's just say cloud infrastructure for kind of,
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let's say AWS, the axis it was super good at
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was very flexible compute infrastructure.
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So I could deploy it, I could scale it up,
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I could scale it down.
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What it was bad at was having all of the capabilities,
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all the security, all of the infrastructure,
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kind of robustness of a traditional data center
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at the point when it was first introduced in kind of '05, '06.
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SaaS, similarly, I think had that same dynamic.
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You know, when Salesforce first launched,
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it probably looked like a worse or simpler seabull.
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But the variable that it was really good at
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was you could deploy it in a three or five or 10 person team
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or a small business.
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And it was like the best CRM ever for that size company
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because now for the first time ever,
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that size company could have an actual CRM system
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as opposed to hiring Accenture and having a full
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kind of deployment inside your data center of seabull.
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So I look at AI through that same kind of,
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and then, you know, naturally what happens is,
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is, you know, Salesforce invests more engineers,
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builds more features, eventually, actually,
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you know, the axis of that simplicity
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gets more and more advanced, it still starts simple,
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but it can be more robust.
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And all of a sudden it kind of overtakes
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the kind of incumbent.
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And, you know, cloud computing did the exact same thing.
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Starts out simple, dev tests workloads,
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people using it to build micro apps
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or small startups would use it.
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But then ultimately had more and more features,
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it became more scalable,
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it could support the largest workloads in the world,
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and then it became the dominant computing platform.
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So if you kind of think about SAS
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how that trend and trajectory,
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cloud how that trend and trajectory,
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and then do we see this in AI and AI agents?
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And I would argue yes,
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because of the same, you know,
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kind of similar axes are at play,
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which is right now, you know, what we think of as,
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as, you know, best in class AI,
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let's say GPT-4 or Gemini,
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it can do something super well,
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it can answer questions about contracts,
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it can answer a single customer support inquiry,
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can generate an email.
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But, you know, the more complex the task,
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the kind of worse it'll be,
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it'll get confused, it'll do the wrong thing
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after kind of three or four iterations of that task.
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So we know that the models have to improve,
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we know that it has to get cheaper,
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because sometimes you need to be able to have
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the AI model do multiple things,
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and so it's not just like a single question, single answer,
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so we gotta run it through the AI model multiple times,
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so we need the cost to come down,
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and we need to be able to continue to scale it up.
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So it's sort of worse at very complex tasks
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that you wanna do, you know, at scale,
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but it's really, really good at simpler tasks
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that you're just starting out with.
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And so I think AI will follow that same trend,
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which is you're starting to see the very early phases
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of what it's gonna be good at,
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but you know for a fact that it's gonna get cheaper,
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higher quality, better and more scalable
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because of the, you just extrapolate the curve that we're on,
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and I think that will follow
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then the same exact kind of disruption curve
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that cloud or SaaS or PCs even kind of went through.
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And so the initial tasks are, you know,
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again, like limited amounts of complex workflows,
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but still where you have to generate some degree of text
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or an answer or a customer communication
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or reviewing a document or processing an invoice,
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it's really good at that.
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Completing the entire business process,
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the entire workflow with 99.999% accuracy,
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still probably not, you know, we're not there.
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But again, that's exactly why it starts as a low-end disruptor.
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It means it works better at some things,
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you're not gonna scale it for everything yet,
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but you know that you can ride this technology curve
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and it's gonna get better and better and better.
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It's gonna get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.
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It's gonna get higher quality over time.
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You guys sell to the Fortune 500, right?
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You're out talking to CIOs and the C-suite
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of the Fortune 500.
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And for some reason, this megatrend feels a little bit different.
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Like enterprises seem to be leaning in and wondering like,
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how do I need to change my business?
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'Cause it's gonna take a while.
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What are you seeing happen in large enterprises
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with respect to AI workers and agents?
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- Yeah, I think, well, well, you have this benefit
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of you have an existing crop of, let's say,
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technology leaders or even people in business
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that now within one generation have already seen multiple point,
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like, eras of disruption in their enterprise.
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You know, that wasn't necessarily true within SaaS.
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You know, the internet did happen and that was pretty disruptive,
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but that was less of an internal operational shift
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and much more of a kind of customer facing dynamic
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of distribution and marketing.
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And so because you have IT leaders and business leaders
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that experience kind of pre-SaaS, post-SaaS
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or pre-cloud, post-cloud,
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all of a sudden, you know, it's the same people in charge now
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that are seeing AI happen and they see how much shifted
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because of the cloud transformation or the SaaS transformation.
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And I think that means that they're more prepared,
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strategically, mentally, operationally for, okay,
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a new technology disruption is emerging.
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How do we respond to it?
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And they have the capacity, they have the talent
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to try and respond.
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So I still would bet on SMBs adopting agents
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at scale first, to be clear,
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but there is less reluctance, less sort of conservatism
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or let's say skepticism of AI than what we saw
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with the initial phases of cloud for, you know,
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a large enterprise simply because they saw
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that cloud became real, SaaS became real,
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it became the dominant standard.
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And I think that you have a large enterprise
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that's not wanting to miss out
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when that also happens with AI.
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So which departments or roles within an organization,
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do you think are the best suited for AI workers
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or AI agents today?
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And why do you think, like, why are those roles really well
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suited for this type of disruption today?
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>> Yeah, so I think that there's probably a couple
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of different axes to think about this on.
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It's sort of like what is the, for lack of a better term,
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interface in which people communicate
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with that particular type of work or labor?
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So if the interface is, you're always talking
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to somebody via chat or email,
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then you have a very good kind of interface
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in which, you know, AI can respond to things
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and to the end consumer, you know, it doesn't,
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it's not obvious that something has changed
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or maybe even the convenience has increased
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as a result of that.
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So that's sort of one dynamic.
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You have another dynamic, which is,
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which is, is there type of work where you're kind
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of largely sitting at a computer screen,
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reviewing things, typing things, you know,
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generating text of some sort?
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And is there a way for AI agents not to replace
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what you're doing, but to augment what you're doing
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to make it so you can do it even faster?
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And so, so I'd say I just described
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probably two totally different categories of work,
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but both of which offer great opportunity for AI
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to become a huge point of leverage.
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So, so on one hand, obviously, we, I think we can,
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I've come to expect the idea that, you know,
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if a customer comes to your website
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and just wants to figure out what's the pricing for,
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you know, my size company and what product
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would I be most interested in?
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You know, that, that, it's a far better convenient experience
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if the customer can get an instant answer back to that.
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And you'll probably generate a faster lead, you know,
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when you can reduce the barrier to having that conversation
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or asking that question.
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Similarly, if you have a customer, an existing customer
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that, that, you know, just is like,
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I need my password reset or the software's not working
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or something about the system is down.
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Again, that, that sort of time to resolution,
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that time to answer matters more than kind of
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almost any other variable to that customer.
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And so, another great example where AI can really augment
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the work that, that people are doing.
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So that's kind of a, you know, let's say a, a, a, a,
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a B2C kind of component.
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And then you have internal operations
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which lend themselves well to AI,
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which is, you know, we've seen the most classical one,
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which is let's say GitHub co-pilot.
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GitHub co-pilot is, is brilliant because you have a workforce
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that, that other than when they're collaborating
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with other people, you know, verbally
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or in any other kind of situation,
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they're, they're typing lines of text
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in a computer terminal and, and, and, and you can, you know,
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you can basically bring the world's intelligence
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to that process by typing that text faster
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in the form of, of AI intelligence helping you write code.
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And so it's kind of like the perfect,
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it's kind of like the perfect dynamic,
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which is like the interface is like a linear interface.
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The, the, the sort of knowledge of coding is, is very, you know,
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prevalent on the internet in the form of open source
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and, and lots of code libraries and sack overflow information.
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And so that's kind of like why I didn't get how co-pilot
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has been the killer app of AI.
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But things get more complicated
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the less your work looks like that.
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So, you know, lawyers, I would say, is a great example
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of, of a lot of potential.
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But there's a lot of back and forth
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with an external client or counterparty.
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There's a lot of like information that they have to, you know,
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pull in from another human.
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There's a lot of collaboration with, with other parties.
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So, so I think there's areas where AI offers a lot of leverage.
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Like let's review a contract very quickly.
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Give me the clauses that I need to improve from this.
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But at the end of the day, you're still going to go back
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to the client, you're going to have to go explain it to them.
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And so you can't fully automate that work, you know,
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anytime soon, at least.
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So I think you're going to see a continuum of, of kind of like,
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how often is that task kind of executed in a business?
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Is it executed, you know, one time a day, ten times a day,
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a hundred times a day, a thousand times a day?
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How much information is sort of involved in that task?
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How many people need to kind of be involved in it?
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How sort of autonomous is it as a task?
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And I think all of those variables will, will then, you know,
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drive how much AI can automate or augment that work right now.
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Yeah, I think some people are calling,
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when, when AI just performs a specific task, like, you know,
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find me all the contracts in my contract repository with customers
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that have this unique clause and, and, and bring them to my CRO, right?
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Now somebody used to have to go do that.
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You used to take four hours.
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Now, like that task can be given to you like an agent.
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And in some cases, as you mentioned, like, like an entire job role
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might get replaced with the AI, like, I, I think I'm kind of calling
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those AI workers.
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So you, you mentioned the example of the, of the tier one tech support person,
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which is like, I forgot my password, you know, reset my username.
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It looked like, like all the basic stuff that you just look in the knowledge
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base
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and get an answer back to a customer, like, that's probably going to be the
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work
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that gets kind of displaced by AI sort of first, because the AI can do like
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that
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job perfectly or the frontline sales rep as you've been injured or things like
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that.
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But what do you think companies are going to do with all these efficiency
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gains and productivity gains?
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They get by hiring AI workers and bringing AI agents onto their teams.
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What are they going to do?
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Well, I think, you know, this is, um, uh, I think there's a way that you could,
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you could look at everything I've said thus far and be sort of worried for the
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workforce.
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Um, I, I, I, I let the human workforce, which is, I think the more important
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workforce.
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Um, I actually take the opposite lens and, um, and I think that the, um,
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I think history has proven that this is the case, you know, time and time again
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with technology, productivity gains, um, with an asterisk that this will not be
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true
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of every individual firm.
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It's more of a kind of a macro view, but because every firm might make a
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different
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decision on what to do with that productivity gain.
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But I think, you know, by default, my view is in areas of your business where
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you get productivity improvements and let's take like the most obvious, you
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know,
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easiest productivity improvement of all time to understand at least mentally is
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like, let's say sales rep productivity, which is like, I spend a dollar on
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sales
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rep salary.
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How many dollars do I get out on, on the ultimate, you know, ROI or revenue
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generated and like that's like, like, you know, that's at least classically one
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of the
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more, uh, uh, you know, isolated ways you can look at productivity.
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It's very hard in engineering.
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It's very hard in marketing, but, but sales rep productivity is like, you know,
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one of the more classic areas.
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If I'm just speaking for box right now, but I think this extends to most, most
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companies, if I can, you know, pay a dollar and get back $2, I might be willing
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to spend a, you know, a certain amount of dollars to get the $2.
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I can pay a dollar and get $2.50.
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I'm probably going to spend more money on, on the dollar side on the, on the,
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uh, on the investment side because the return has just gone up dramatically for
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that dollar invested.
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And I think what people think of initially your reaction is, well, if you get
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it,
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if you spend a dollar and you get $2.50 back, then you'll just spend over time
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that same dollar and you'll just be, you'll just give the 250.
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And I think most, most people that participate in capitalism kind of say,
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well, wait a second, actually like that 250 I want as many of those as possible
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Because that might clear a new threshold where the ROI is so positive that I
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should
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keep investing as many dollars as I can until, until that basically
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productivity
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number goes back down.
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And so my instinct is in most areas where you see productivity gains,
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what you'll actually see is reinvestment back into the business.
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Now, sometimes that will be reinvestment back into technology and AI, because
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you'll just, because it's just working so well, you just want more of that.
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But oftentimes in the business as you're growing, you still eventually will
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then
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need, you know, humans to go do all the things that AI can't do.
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And, um, and that's where I'm actually pretty optimistic, which is if I can get
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if I could generate X more leads per dollar, um, you know, using an AI platform
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I'm probably going to hire more sales reps on the other end of that workflow,
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where I was previously constrained because the dollars invested in my lead gen
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system were taking up a lot of my dollars and it was only X level, you know, X
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percent productive.
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Um, but now if it's more productive, I'm going to actually need more sales reps
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to handle all those leads.
17:53
And I think the same thing is true for engineers.
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If I can, if I can, you know, generate 20% more code per dollar of engineering
18:01
work, um, I'm going to want, I'm going to eventually have more features that I
18:05
'm
18:05
building, which eventually if I'm doing my job should mean more revenue for the
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company.
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And if I have more revenue for the company, I'm going to want more features
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again.
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And those dollars will again go back into engineering.
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So, so I think in, in, at a macro level, I think that most of this
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ultimately results in the productivity gains or efficiency gains going back
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into
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the business to drive more growth, more ingenuity, more creativity, um, as
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opposed
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to just being harvested.
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I think what, what an economist might look at is like, well, that was, get
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harvested as more profit.
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The problem with that flaw is the flaw with that is that nobody's in a static
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environment.
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So if you're harvesting those profits, you're going to have a competitor that
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says, no, I don't need to harvest the profits.
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I'm going to grow faster.
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So, so you won't be able to, you won't be able to have, you know, sort of a
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ridiculous level of profit as a result of AI, because everybody's in a
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competitive
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space and we will compete out those profits over time.
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So again, this is kind of why I think ultimately the human side of this
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equation is, is, you know, ultimately, you know, probably actually thrives in
19:05
this
19:05
model because it gets us from doing maybe the, you know, more, you know,
19:09
road work and we get to now do a little bit more incrementally creative work as
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result of this.
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Yeah, we saw speaking of, of the competition we saw with the cloud movement,
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we saw a little bit of FOMO, right?
19:21
It's like your competitor was kind of moving into this like new architecture.
19:25
But with AI, I think we're seeing some serious FOMO.
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And so we have, we have, we have companies taking action, which is kind of why
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we're
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here at this, at this summit, talking about the future of, of the workforce and
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what it looks like.
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Um, do you, do you see companies taking action?
19:42
You know, 2023, I think was a year of paralyzation where everybody was
19:45
wondering,
19:45
what do I do?
19:46
Is this thing safe?
19:47
What are the rules?
19:48
What's my competitor doing?
19:50
But what's happening in 2024?
19:52
What are you saying?
19:53
Yeah, I think that we're definitely seeing absolutely more action than 2023.
19:57
Um, uh, I would say that I think this, this still pales in comparison to, to,
20:03
you
20:03
know, a couple of years from now.
20:04
And the reason why, um, uh, ironically, actually the, the rate of change in the
20:11
industry, um, is, um, it is, is, is because it's actually so fast.
20:17
It actually causes customers or companies to, to really have to be very
20:22
thoughtful about architecture decisions.
20:24
Um, it actually pays that there's a, even higher premium right now to making
20:29
the
20:29
right architecture bets on the right platforms.
20:32
Because if you just dive in to the first thing that, that you hear about, you
20:37
know, it's, it's, you know, it's, you get any odds that, that, that that thing
20:41
is
20:41
the wrong architecture or the wrong platform that will not actually accrue to
20:46
get all of the, the accruing benefits of, uh, of, of, of AI.
20:50
Um, and so, so I do think that's what we saw last year, um, is a lot of people
20:55
step back and say, you know what?
20:56
It's probably a little bit too soon to bet on one AI platform because I'm
21:00
hearing
21:00
about this open AI thing.
21:02
Google's all, you know, getting their act together.
21:04
This anthropic thing's very cool.
21:05
Um, and so what do I bet on?
21:07
And now, you know, a year later, you're seeing that, okay, I, I kind of see the
21:11
contours of the industry sort of shaping up.
21:13
And so I'm willing to now make an investment, um, and start to get, you know,
21:17
some of these, these gains, um, but, but I, but I, I still think we're earlier
21:22
than, um, then, then, you know, we're like almost last year's kind of a wash.
21:27
I think we're, I think it's almost like this is the first year where you can
21:30
actually dive in, which means that probably next year, things will be five
21:33
times more mature in terms of where things have settled out.
21:37
Um, but I think this is a moment in, and it's, and this is always true of, of
21:41
technology transitions.
21:42
This is a moment where your architecture matters a ton and who you bet on it
21:46
matters a ton.
21:47
Um, you know, obviously like if you made a CRM decision in like 2003, um, you
21:53
know, it may not have been a hundred percent obvious, which, which, you know,
21:56
direction you should go in.
21:57
Um, but the people that let's say chose sales force got all of the
22:00
compounding benefits of the entire super cycle of cloud and SaaS, but you
22:04
know, you make one wrong chain, one wrong decision there and you might be
22:08
stuck for five years on the wrong architecture.
22:10
And I think that that companies are, are sort of realizing they actually have
22:13
to make the right decisions in this point in time, which does, you know,
22:17
lead to a little bit more evaluation, a little bit more trying to figure out
22:20
what, uh, what, what, what the future looks like.
22:22
But, um, but this definitely the year where we're first, you know,
22:25
seeing these types of deployments.
22:26
Yeah.
22:26
It's, it's really happening.
22:28
It's pretty crazy.
22:29
Let's talk about box for a second.
22:31
Um, last I heard you guys had 110 plus thousand customers, something
22:36
like that, my directionally sort of right.
22:37
Yep.
22:38
Um, who are, who are your workers?
22:41
And when you think about bringing, you know, AI into the box platform
22:45
in the form of an AI agents or an AI worker, like, what does that
22:48
mean for your software?
22:49
How are you thinking about it?
22:50
Yeah.
22:51
So, so, um, uh, we're big believers in this kind of based on the premise
22:56
of your, your initial questions, which is if you think about, you know,
22:59
what are all the things that you could actually do with content?
23:02
So what we are, we're a platform that helps enterprises manage their,
23:05
their content.
23:05
So think contracts, marketing assets, invoices, financial, you know,
23:10
documents, HR records, all that, you know, the, you know, the most important
23:13
content in your enterprise, you're going to want to secure, you're going to
23:16
want to manage, uh, uh, effectively integrated across your software.
23:20
And all that content has a tremendous amount of value in it, but it's largely
23:25
untapped by most organizations.
23:26
And so our, our sort of view is, well, what if you had an intelligent platform
23:29
that let you actually get more value from that information?
23:32
Uh, your, your question earlier about showing all the contracts of a
23:35
particular, with a particular criteria, um, you know, that right now in most
23:40
organizations could be like a five hour process at best.
23:43
It might be like a multi month process at worst.
23:45
Um, if your data is just fragmented across, you know, everywhere.
23:48
Well, what if it could become like a one second process?
23:51
Um, you know, what would, what would you need to do or have done in your,
23:55
in a kind of intelligent content management system that could cause it.
23:59
So you could ask any question and get an answer back from your data or, um,
24:03
where you take, you know, all of your marketing assets or all of your sales
24:07
information or all of your product, uh, data, and you let employees just ask a
24:11
question of that information and get an answer back as opposed to get a link
24:14
to a file that then they have to go read.
24:16
And you know, maybe spend an hour of their day just trying to find one, one
24:19
specific answer.
24:20
So this is the potential of AI plus enterprise content.
24:24
Um, and so our, our view is that, is that you need to go on a platform
24:27
and makes that incredibly easy to do.
24:29
Um, and so we're, we're building that platform.
24:31
That's box AI.
24:32
And, uh, it lets you ask questions of your data.
24:35
It'll let you not yet, uh, but both our, our sort of direction is very similar
24:40
to this conversation was let you automate workflows where AI agents are,
24:45
you know, often reviewing content, extracting data, making, you know, to
24:50
some extent decisions about, about, you know, that, that, you know, the process
24:54
that that, you know, content should go through, uh, in invoices of us, of,
24:57
above
24:58
a certain amount that should route to one person.
25:00
A contract has this pretty good language in it.
25:02
That's route to a different person.
25:04
Um, so we believe AI agents will, will do a lot of that type of work.
25:07
Um, and the amazing thing is, I think for our business and, and for a lot
25:12
of other, uh, SaaS platforms out there, I'd say 95% of the use cases
25:17
that customers come to us for with AI are not use cases that humans today
25:22
are doing in that business.
25:24
So this is not that, that there's some, you know, you know, group of people,
25:29
there's a hundred people out there doing all this work and AI is going to go
25:32
replace that.
25:33
It's actually all of the work that we never got around to because it was
25:37
just, it just fell below the line.
25:39
It was just like the thing that took too long or the ROI just was not the ROI
25:44
was just not optimized for, I can throw, you know, a six figure, uh, employee
25:49
at this problem.
25:50
It's just not, it's not valuable and not, but could I throw up, you know,
25:54
$50 of AI compute at that problem?
25:56
Absolutely.
25:57
And so, and so this is what AI begins to unlock is like all of the stuff
26:01
that we never got around to all of the reviewing of contracts or,
26:05
or getting our data cleaned up or being able to ask questions of information
26:09
that right now people are just going into a slack channel and asking a question
26:12
on AI, beginning to be able to do all of that, which means that we just get
26:16
more again, productivity for the actual human employees in the organization.
26:19
So that's what we're excited about.
26:20
Yeah.
26:22
2024.
26:23
We're here in, in July and we're seeing,
26:26
in one of the AI workforce upon us, AI customer support reps on the front
26:32
lines, AI inside sales reps, the examples you mentioned with box around AI
26:37
operations or AI analysts.
26:40
Uh, we're talking about AI paralegals.
26:42
We haven't even talked about recruiting, right?
26:44
And sourcing candidates there.
26:45
There are so many examples and I think it's captivating people's minds,
26:50
which is why we're all here at this summit.
26:52
But I know you don't have a crystal ball, Aaron, but you're pretty good at kind
26:57
of seeing what the future looks like in the next couple of years.
27:00
So as you look out now on two years from now or three years from now,
27:04
what's the world going to look like and how fast do you think we're going to
27:08
see all this progress?
27:09
Yeah.
27:10
The problem with any crystal ball stuff these days is like, if you would ask
27:12
that question in October of 2022, uh, my answer would have aged, uh, you
27:18
know, within a month as like the dumbest answer of all time.
27:21
So, so, you know, I'd be talking about like VR AR as like, you know, the
27:25
only thing that matters.
27:26
And so, so I'd say it's very hard to predict anything at this point.
27:31
Um, you know, that we're on an exponential curve and, and that, that, you
27:36
know, you can kind of try and extrapolate from an exponential curve, but
27:39
then there's crazy step functions that sort of exceed even the exponent, um,
27:43
that, that you were on.
27:44
So, um, so if, if I just take all of the, if I take today's curve without,
27:50
you know, any knowledge of a step function or kind of complete asymmetric shift
27:55
then you can, you know, at least a few things are true.
27:58
Your AI models get vastly more intelligent.
28:01
That matters because that means that it can make, uh, it can, you can bring
28:05
more
28:05
reasoning to more basically workflows.
28:08
Um, and so, you know, let's say you have a, uh, a case of a, of a, of an AI
28:13
agent
28:13
answering customer questions wrong 5% of the time.
28:17
Well, as AI reasoning goes up, you can just see that that, that number will
28:22
shrink.
28:23
And so, you know, probably what, if that number is, is 5% today, it'll probably
28:27
be like 0.1% in three years from now.
28:29
So just that's where the exponent, that's where the exponential shift in AI
28:33
quality of the models goes.
28:35
Um, you have another component, which is the cost of compute continues to drop,
28:40
mostly because of GPU performance going up and AI model efficiency improving.
28:45
And so that means that if today a task with AI costs, you know, $2 to complete
28:50
that task, you can just kind of, you know, squint and see that it'll probably
28:53
cost like, like 10 cents in three years.
28:56
So, so just think about what that opens up when you have a 90 or 95% reduction
29:01
in underlying cost of, of what you're doing.
29:03
So you have a, let's say, a, you know, a 20 X improvement in costs, uh, an X
29:09
percent increase in model quality.
29:11
That just opens up way more use cases where AI right now might look like a toy,
29:15
but, but you just continue to merge up that, that, that curve of, you know,
29:21
more
29:21
and more complex use cases because the technology is cheaper.
29:24
It's more robust and it's in its higher quality.
29:26
Um, and I think that that we're already, you know, we're already on that curve.
29:30
And so in three years, you'll just see, I don't know, a hundred times more
29:33
agents in the world doing work than what we have today.
29:38
Well, the PC movement was exciting, the cloud, SaaS, mobile, social media.
29:43
But I think every, you know, all that pales in comparison to how exciting it is
29:48
in the tech industry right now, Aaron, I want to thank you so much for joining
29:52
us
29:52
today at the, I work for summit.
29:54
I really appreciate it being here.
29:55
Good to be here.
29:56
And this is like the old, there's like the final movement I can participate in.
29:59
So like I can't have any more technology shifts in my lifetime.
30:02
So like I hope this is just the final one.
30:05
Let's make a count.
30:06
It's been crazy.
30:08
So all right.
30:09
Thanks a lot, Aaron.