Box CEO says AI is driving hiring, not layoffs: Here’s how

The dominant narrative around AI and employment is one of displacement. Meta, Coinbase, and others have cited the technology as justification for laying off workers. Box is running a different experiment, and its CEO says the results are in: AI is making his company hire more people, not fewer.

Box, which has been transformed by AI for the last four years, has introduced 13 new job categories ranging from AI architects, AI solutions managers, and AI platforms leaders to the senior director of AI, data, and integration. The firm is set to surpass 3,000 workers by the beginning of next year after having started this year with 2,900 people.

Box CEO Aaron Levie, who co-founded the firm in 2005, credits their expansion to two trends coming together. "We ourselves are selling AI to our customers, so that's actually causing us to need to hire more people," he said. "And as users of AI, we're getting new forms of productivity that are also causing us to hire people."

Box has integrated AI into the software that enables it to offer services to over 100,000 customers, such as government agencies and Morgan Stanley, for document management.

Features that employ AI technology enable automatic tasks such as contract management, and the efforts are yielding returns. Box achieved an income growth of 11% over the last quarter, making it the fastest growth since 2022.

Productivity gained through the use of AI has enabled Box to target market sectors that were previously unaffordable to employ workers in them. Employees are now being hired for each industry segment rather than hiring more individuals.

"Now, you're hiring one or two to do the work of 10 because you can finally afford to do that work," Levie said.

One of the more counterintuitive aspects of Box's experience is that its pace of hiring software engineers has not slowed despite AI becoming significantly better at writing code.

"Now that we can basically build way more features for our customers, it is actually attractive for us to have more engineers doing that," he said.

Stephan Meier, a professor of business strategy at Columbia Business School, cautions that Box's experience is unlikely to offset AI-related job losses across the broader economy.