How Box created 13 new types of jobs because of AI
When artificial intelligence started changing his business four years ago, Aaron Levie, Box’s chief executive, decided to adapt.
Box, a Silicon Valley maker of data storage and management software, has begun embedding artificial intelligence into its products. It started selling AI aimed at automating tasks such as reviewing and approving contracts. And she asked employees to put aside their usual work and help other colleagues use AI
That led Box to post a new job last fall: senior director of AI, data and integration, to help it connect its internal systems and data so its workers can better use AI.
The job was one of 13 new kinds of roles Box created for AI, with titles like AI architect, AI solution manager, and AI platform leader. With the addition of these positions, Box expects to have more than 3,000 employees by the beginning of next year, up from 2,900 at the start of this year.
“We ourselves sell AI to our customers, so it actually causes us to need to hire more people,” said Mr. Levie, 41. “And as an AI user, we gain new forms of productivity that also force us to hire people.”
Across the tech industry, with companies like Meta and Coinbase laying off workers in the name of artificial intelligence, many fear that powerful technology that can generate code and answer questions will increasingly replace workers in jobs like computer programming and engineering management.
But Box shows that AI can also spur job creation, making the job picture nuanced. Demand for cybersecurity experts has soared due to the explosion of AI-generated code that needs to be vetted, for example, while companies including Google are recruiting more engineers to help integrate AI into their customers’ systems.
Growth in these roles is unlikely to make up for AI-related job cuts. As the technology continues to evolve, it’s unclear whether these jobs are permanent or temporary and whether companies can find workers with the skills to do the work, said Stephan Meier, a professor of business strategy at Columbia Business School.
But new technologies have long created new jobs, he said. In the 1970s and 1980s, the arrival of computers in the workplace led to information technology departments, so “now there’s IT, there’s a chief information officer and so on,” Mr. Meier said. “Whole new jobs, new businesses, new titles have been created.”
Mr. Levie helped found Box in 2005. The company’s software, which is often deployed behind the scenes, helps companies store and work with documents and other data. The company has more than 100,000 customers, including federal agencies and Morgan Stanley, and went public in 2015.
Box has typically taken a slow and steady approach to recruiting. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company hasn’t started hiring during the pandemic, as much of the tech industry has. From 2019 to 2022, its workforce has increased by 20 percent to approximately 2,500 employees. Some of its peers, which have shed thousands of jobs in recent months, have doubled or tripled over the years.
“We’ve never done any large-scale layoffs, and that remains our big commitment,” said Jessica Swank, Box’s chief human resources officer.
When OpenAI kicked off the AI frenzy with the release of ChatGPT in 2022, Mr. Levie said, he was excited about the technology’s power. Box has infused its software with artificial intelligence, adding features where the technology performs tasks such as creating documents.
The moves are starting to pay off. Box’s revenue rose 11 percent from a year earlier in the latest quarter, the company reported in May, the fastest growth since 2022. But the company, which has seen its shares fall about 7 percent this year, has been dogged by concerns about whether AI will eventually replace Box’s software.
Mr Levie said he believed companies would continue to buy software rather than build their own with AI because third-party software was likely to be more secure and reliable. Meanwhile, his company is investing in incorporating AI into its products.
Box also invests in new jobs that it sees as long-term. As AI models evolve, the way they answer questions or are structured may change, Mr. Levie said. That means Box customers will need help using the new models, he said.
“It’s kind of a question of when will AI slow down?” said Mr. Levie. “That would be the point where you might have some kind of retention, dampening” of recruiting.
Among the roles Box is adding are “forward-deployment engineers” to help customers who may want to use AI but lack the technical know-how. Another is “enterprise AI automation engineers,” who are part of the IT department and help colleagues use AI to increase productivity and take the drudgery out of their work.
Box also created new roles for evaluating AI models, hiring people like Sidharth Srinivasan, 23. Mr. Srinivasan, who joined Box full-time last year after graduating from Stanford University, measures the performance of AI models to help customers decide which models are best for certain tasks.
“If I had been talking to myself two years ago and said I’m working on AI assessments, I would have said, what is this?” said Mr. Srinivisan. “With every technological innovation, the type of work you have to do to adapt to it is just slightly different.”
The company said its pace of hiring software engineers hasn’t slowed even as AI has gotten better at coding. With the advent of AI agents that can perform tasks autonomously, a software engineer can manage the agents and accomplish what would previously have required a team of engineers, Mr. Levie said. That means each additional engineer contributes more, he said, making it even more worthwhile to hire them.
“The role we’re currently adding is in core engineering,” Mr Levie said. “Now that we can basically build a lot more features for our customers, it’s actually attractive to us to have more engineers doing that.”
The increased productivity from AI has allowed Box to justify hiring people it wouldn’t have had to in the past, Mr. Levie said. The company hired to market to specific industries, something it couldn’t do before because the tasks would require too many workers, he said. But artificial intelligence has made this work more efficient and possible.
“Now you’re hiring one or two to do a job out of 10 because you can finally afford to do the job,” Mr Levie said.