Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, doesn’t foresee AI agents taking over the roles of enterprise SaaS (software-as-a-service) platforms. Speaking at the TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 conference on Wednesday, he predicted a future where SaaS and AI agents work together in a blended model.
“Typically, when you establish a business process, you want to encode it as business logic within deterministic systems—mainly because the risk of unexpected changes is quite significant,” Levie noted.
“When it comes to mission-critical tasks, we’ve already witnessed incidents where agents have either leaked sensitive data or caused unforeseen disruptions in production environments. That’s why it’s important to maintain a clear boundary between the predictable elements of your software and the more unpredictable, agent-driven aspects.”
Levie described a vision for enterprise software where SaaS platforms handle the essential business operations, while agents operate on top to assist with decision-making, automate tasks, and generally speed up whatever users are trying to accomplish within the system.
He also emphasized that this shift would significantly alter the business model for enterprise SaaS providers.
“I’m pretty certain that we’ll see a hundred, maybe even a thousand times more agents than human users. That means the majority of interactions with SaaS platforms will come from agents rather than people,” Levie explained.
Consequently, the standard “per-seat” pricing model will become obsolete, and companies will need to adopt usage-based or volume-driven pricing structures to accommodate AI agents.
This transformation creates a significant opportunity for startups, especially those designing products with an agent-first approach, as opposed to established companies trying to retrofit agents into their current systems.
According to Levie, smaller startups have the advantage of starting from scratch, allowing them to build processes optimized for agents from the outset.
He believes this opens the door for startups to develop enterprise solutions that simplify and improve the process of managing organizational change.
Levie urged founders to seize this moment by innovating and building new solutions.
“We’re currently experiencing a rare period—something we haven’t seen in about 15 years—where a major platform shift in technology is creating space for a new generation of companies,” Levie remarked.
“So I would encourage everyone to take full advantage of this opportunity.”
