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Just as the tech selloff was gaining steam last week, Box CEO Aaron Levie was interviewed at the Cisco AI Summit in San Francisco and asked about the narrative of AI killing SaaS. Levie, who is in the software-as-a-service business, acknowledged his obvious bias before giving a cogent 2-point argument for why the Saas business is not slated for extinction (even though he said software will become cheaper).
Levie's first point is that building home-grown ERP software for things like accounting, billing, and human resources is low on the list of priorities for most businesses. AI may make it easier to build it yourself, but it still requires time and attention better spent serving the customer.
"We all collectively have a fixed amount of resources in our organization, and our customer only pays us more if we can deliver more things that they want to buy and that better support their needs. Us vibe coding an ERP system is sort of not on that list of things our customers care about," he said.
Second, said Levie, as AI agents handle more and more tasks, they will require a "traffic cop" to keep the system running smoothly and step in when agents inevitably make mistakes. In a company where AI agents vastly outnumber human employees, "you now have 100 times more opportunities for value creation—or risk, if it’s not managed well," said Levie.
"That’s the power of software: We’ve codified our workflows and business processes into a system that will run the same way every single time. And that, I don't think, reduces in value even in a world of cheaper or more volume of software."—AO
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