Todd

The same kinds of productivity gains we've seen in coding with AI agents are heading to the rest of knowledge work. This is the jump when you go from having a chatbot to being able to actually have an agent go off and do work for minutes or even hours and come back with a complete work output that you then review. Here's an example of the new Box Agent filling out an RFP response from an existing knowledge base. This process would normally take hours to fill out, and requires the full attention of the user doing the work. Now, you provide the Box Agent with the RFP questions, and it will go off, make a plan, extract all the relevant questions, read through existing source material to come up with an answer, and then generate a new word document as the final output. All while you're doing something else. The key to this architecture is that the agent is able to use all of the same tools in the background that a user uses to get work done. The agent can search for documents, read entire files, run scripts and tools in the background, and even be able to write code on the fly to automate tasks it hasn't seen before. And best of all, the Box Agent will (soon) work from the Box MCP and CLI so you can invoke it in any agentic system as a step in a process. This kind of agent complexity would have been impossible even 6 months ago. Models consistently failed at tracking long running tasks or using the right tools at the right moment for the task. But this is all now possible because of models like GPT-5.4, Opus 4.6, and Gemini 3, and is only getting better by the month. Just as we moved from engineers writing code and using AI as an assistant to answer questions, in many areas of knowledge work -like legal, finance, consulting, sales, marketing, and more- when we have a problem we'll just kick off the AI agent to just go work on it for us in the background.

Had meetings and a dinner with 20+ enterprise AI and IT leaders today. Lots of interesting conversations around the state of AI in large enterprises, especially regulated businesses. Here are some of general trends: * Agents are clearly the big thing. Enterprises moving from talking about chatbots to agents, though we’re still very early. Coding is still the dominant agentic use-case being adopted thus far, with other categories of across knowledge work starting to emerge. Lots of agentic work moving from pilots and PoCs into production, and some enterprises had lots of active live use-cases. * Agentic use-cases span every part of a business, from back office operations to client facing experiences from sales to customer onboarding workflows. General feeling is that agentic workflows will hit every part of an organization, often with biggest focus on delivering better for customers, getting better insights and intelligence from data and documents, speeding up high ROI workflows with agents, and so on. Very limited discussion on pure cost cutting. * Data and AI governance still remain core challenges. Getting data and content into a spot that agents can securely and easily operate on remains a huge task for more organizations. Years of data management fragmentation that wasn’t a problem now is an issue for enterprises looking to adopt agents. And governing what agents can do with data in a workflow still a major topic. * Identity emerging as a big topic. Can the agent have access to everything you have? In a world of dozens of agents working on behalf, potentially too much data exposure and scope for the agents. How do we manage agents with partitioned level of access to your information? * Lots of emerging questions on how we will budget for tokens across use-cases and teams. Companies don’t want to constrain use-cases, but equally need to be mindful of ultimate token budgets. This is going to become a bigger part of OpEx over time, and probably won’t make sense to be considered an IT budget anymore. Likely needs to be factored into the rest of operating expenses. * Interoperability is key. Every enterprise is deploying multiple AI systems right now, and it’s unlikely that there’s going to be a single platform to rule them all. Customers are getting savvier on how to handle agent interoperability, and this will be one of the biggest drivers of an AI stack going forward. Lots more takeaways than just this, but needless to say the momentum is building but equally enterprises are acutely aware of the change management and work ahead. Lots of opportunity right now.