Transcript

The enterprise AI revolution is underway, with Box’s Aaron Levie

Free .txt

0:01 The very best founders I know are brilliant at building systems. They connect teams, they remove bottlenecks, and they eliminate single points of failure. And yet When it comes to their own wealth. Most are running a disconnected stack. A tax accountant here and a state attorney there, a wealth manager who doesn't talk to either one of them.

0:22 Creative planning was built to fix exactly that. One integrated team of tax professionals, state planners, investment specialists, all coordinated by a dedicated wealth manager who sees your full financial picture and keeps every piece working together. Proactive tax efficiency, state strategy, investments all under one roof. Creative planning where wealth works together. Learn more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale.

0:53 Hey folks, Jeff Berman here. I am thrilled to share some of the new names who will be joining us at this year's Masters of Scale summit. This may be our biggest stage yet. Reed Hastings, Meredith Whitaker, Van Jones, Amjad Masad, and more. Will be there with us October 20th through 22nd in San Francisco. If you're building something great, or you want to build something great, We want you there with us too.

1:20 Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. Having done this now for twenty years, starting right at the at the start of the cloud, seeing the iPhone, seeing the iPad. This is absolutely the fastest I've ever seen tech move by at least five to ten X. Every week, something is happening that is causing this category to shift in some direction.

1:52 Something will happen at ten PM and there'll be like a a group chat with with AI friends. Everybody's blowing up like oh my god, I can't believe this just happened and then it'll be an internal slack with, you know, fifteen people on the AI team of oh god, we have to jump on this. And it's just like Hope everybody has you know had their family dinner and that's all behind them'cause now we're we're back wired in on uh on what's happening. That's Aaron Levy, founder and CEO of Box. I put Aaron on the cover of Fast Company a decade ago to represent how a generation of new leaders were embracing adaptability.

2:30 I wanted to go back to Aaron now because his cloud storage firm is increasingly an AI firm, putting him at the heart of a new wave of chaotic change. Aaron gives us an insider's roadmap. On where AI is moving for enterprises, why there's so much buzz about AI agents, and what it means to be an AI first organization. Aaron isn't shy about calling things as he sees them, whether that's mistakes others are making with AI, or critiques of both Trump and Biden. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this Із рапід респан.

3:08 I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Aaron Levy, CEO of Cloud Storage and Tools Platform Box. Aaron, great to see you. Thanks for being here. Thanks, Bob. Good to uh good to be here. So I went to your LinkedIn page just earlier and I scrolled down your posts over the last few months and it's like AI, AI, A I then AI agents, AI agents, AI agents. You are you are all in, aren't you?

3:36 All in, all in. So we what we when we saw the the you know, everybody kinda had their chat GPT moment and ours was like, wow, all of a sudden we're gonna be able to use AI on top of all of this unstructured data that we have. So in box, it's contracts and invoices and marketing assets and research data. And so the the initial breakthrough use case was okay, we can now talk to our data, we can ask it questions, we can get insights from all this information. And then somewhere about last year, There was this sort of emerging concept of agents, which is, you know, what if you actually had these AI models think longer. Uh they they they could use tools, they could go back and and check it, double check and answer or kind of apply more judgment later later in the in the stream of work. And so we jumped full on on that. And so we've we're we're kind of all in on uh on AI agents right now. Now I g I gotta ask you, some folks murmur that AI's

4:28 Business impact isn't quite living up to the promise yet. You know, the sellers of the picks and shovels of AI are making money, but Few prospectors have struck gold with AI tools. Practically for real, w like where are we on this effectiveness curve for for AI?

4:45 I I would take the other side of that that argument that prospectors are, let's say, cursor or winser for these AI products that that automatically generate marketing, you know, content for you, or Figma generating, you know, design assets and and web pages. I think you certainly have the picks and shovels, all of the the hyperscalers. You know, that that's kind of always gonna be the the first phase of the roll out. But the prospectors, you know, in this analogy of of as the app layer, I think we're seeing some of the fastest growing companies in history. get built on this this AI foundation. As far as every stat I've seen, Cursor is the fastest growing software company in history, at least in an enterprise context. And that is one hundred percent due to having AI agents right next to you while you're coding that can you know, accelerate your code development. On the enterprise front, you know, and the customers we talk to, they are doing everything from saying, hey, I want to take uh, you know, 100,000 contracts and automatically review them with AI and extract the most relevant data from those contracts, or I want to take all of my sales presentations that I ever created. And I want new employees to be able to ask them questions so they can get the level of expertise of of an existing employee that's been at a company for a number of years. And so this is already starting to to roll out in in large enterprises.

6:01 you know, the amount of time it takes for these AI products to get incorporated into people's workflows naturally takes some time. I remember having a conversation with a CEO who like you is is a a a tech person and And they were like, I spent two weeks doing nothing but coding and it just blew my mind about what was possible. And I was like, Well, I'm not a coder. How do I actually feel that? And I think it's it's sometimes hard for folks to sort of see that leverage because That layer. Isn't quite here yet.

6:32 I think that's exactly right. GitHub Copilot. was introduced about a year or two before ChatGBT. So developers actually had their chat GBT moment. at at least twelve to eighteen months months before everybody had their chat GPT moment on the consumer side. And so very similarly, Cursor, Windsurf, Replit, these products are now having their AI agent moments. And that is happening a year or a year and a half or two years before then the the general population is gonna have their AI agent moment. Now you can already see the the very initial versions of this. So if you take something like deep research

7:10 inside of ChatGBT or inside of Groc or inside of Perplexity um or or Enthrop or or Claude from Anthropic. You know, this is the first agency use case that I think the the kind of regular knowledge worker will run into, which is, okay, I don't just want a very quick answer to a question about you know, some historical event. I really want the AI to go out and research, you know, a hundred different companies and give me all of the best practices in my particular field for for a specific, you know, type of topic. I want to get the marketing you know, strategies of my the the hundred companies in my in my industry. So this is sort of deep research. And what's happening is the AI Isn't just kind of very quickly in three seconds coming up with an answer where there's the risk of hallucination, or where it hasn't had enough time to kind of uh go across the entire internet and find up to date sources for all of the questions. The ChatGPT moment was was these very quick answers to moderately complex questions. The deep research moment of of this paradigm is is much longer answers.

8:16 in terms of the amount of content you get. Takes about five or ten minutes of kind of thinking time for these AI models and they're and they're going across, you know, the entire up to date you know, corpus of the world, which is the internet to go get the answer. And and so I'm using this, you know, almost on a daily basis for You know. Every kind of question imaginable in the company. I want I want to figure out the pricing strategy for everybody's AI products. And so late at night, I'll be, you know, kind of alone working. There's not there's not somebody I can just go ping that says, Hey, can you go do this research for me? And you know, 15 minutes later, it it has it's in my queue. And it has come up with the a full research document of every single company in our space and what they're all doing for pricing. And that just moves the project that I'm working on one step forward faster than, you know, by days faster than it would have been in a kind of non-AI world.

9:11 And so I think what what will happen is as these types of products become more pervasive, everybody will have versions of that in their daily work where you're just gonna be sending tasks off to AI agents that are just working on your behalf as as you would have if you if everybody had a research assistant that was fully at their disposal for any kind of project work that they wanted. I talked with Mark Benioff at Salesforce several months ago about his embrace of AI agents, but the use of his agents hasn't quite taken off the way he hoped. I know you launched Box AI Studio to help organizations build their own custom AI agents, and I'm curious how how that's going. Yeah. Uh so far it's it's either at or exceeding our expectations on all the use cases that that customers are coming up with. So we're

9:59 We're pretty blown ab away about the what what we're starting to see. We're still very early days, to be clear, but the but the rate of adoption is is um is going fairly exponential. And the the imagination that customers uh uh now have on this is is blowing us away. So You mean uses you didn't anticipate for for the way they these these agents work. Yeah, I I've never I have I've rarely been in a customer conversation, either one on one or in a dinner, where I'm not hearing about a new idea that the customer has for box AI that we did not have on a whiteboard. And what's what's exciting, and this is counterintuitive, I think, to a lot of folks outside of AI You know, you you you initially sort of see AI in sci fi and and sometimes in the you know news headlines, New York Times or whatever, as like okay, it's going after jobs.

10:47 It's gonna replace these types of work. From my anecdotes. I've had at least a hundred interactions with customers in in the first quarter of this year. The vast majority You know, eighty percent I'm guessing. the bulk of the time of AI use case kind of, you know, conversation was spent on things that the company didn't do before AI.

11:07 So it wasn't, hey, I want to take this type of work and I want AI to go replace it. It was there's a there's a type of work that we never get around to in our company. I want AI to go and do that finally, because finally it's affordable for me to deploy AI agents at the kind of work that we just could not we could not fund before. It's opening up people's imagination to, hey I'm like sitting on You know, fifty thousand customer contracts. What if I could have an AI agent go around all those customer contracts and figure out which customers have the highest propensity to buy this next product from me?

11:42 And this is not something that they would have people ever do. So it's not replacing anybody's job. They never they never said, Oh, let's have fifty people go read all the contracts again. It just never happened. But now If it only cost them five thousand dollars for an AI agent to go do that, they would do that all day long. And so and then guess what? When they get those insights

12:02 They're probably gonna have them more work. for the humans in their business to go and do as a result of this, that hopefully, if it's effective, drives more growth in their business, which then causes even more productivity and then ultimately hiring and growth. And so so so it's not it's not kind of everybody's first instinct, but most of the use cases that we're hearing about are things where Because it is now affordable to deploy AI at a problem. I'm actually expanding the set of things my company can go do and and then the work that we can now execute on. And that's that's not only very, you know, I think exciting, but I think it's gonna be the default case for most AI adoption in the enterprise. It's interesting'cause in some of the conversations that I have, it feels almost like some of the businesses and leaders, they don't really know what they're looking for from AI. And and it's just and hearing you, it sounds a little bit like you have to think about your mindset on it a little differently to

12:56 To open up and find those things that are most valuable To you. Yes. Yeah, every business is gonna be different because because uh some of the upside is a virtue of your business model. What are the core, you know, parts of your business model that As a result of access to information

13:11 can change or be modified or improved. If I am a law firm, I could either reduce my my my cost because now AI is gonna do more of the let's say paralegal work. Or I could expand my service offerings because now all of a sudden my My my my team can can you know venture into more domains because they can take their expertise and use AI to augment that the default assumption is oh no, it's gonna go after the hours of a law firm. But but once this technology hits an individual business, they can actually decide to expand their customer base. They can go after They can go after previously customers that would have been unprofitable for them to serve. So these these industries are not a static and zero sum the software industry

13:55 You know, on one hand everybody says okay, if AI can do coding then will we hire fewer engineers. And in general My argument is that we'll probably hire as many, if not more, engineers if AI can get really good at coding, because what will happen is the productivity rate of our engineer goes up, which means that that that we can then, you know, ascribe a higher degree of value per engineer in the company. So your ROI is even better on each of those

14:21 Exactly. Exactly. And and and take something like sales. If we can make a sales rep Able to sell five percent more. because we give them better data and they can prepare for a customer meeting that much better. Or they can they can, you know, understand exactly the best pitch because they have access to all of boxes data and they can ask it questions I'm not gonna just bank that as five percent more profit. Because what will happen is we're gonna internally in some in some planning session, we're gonna get greedy and we're gonna say, Wait a second, that five percent gain that we just got in sales productivity, what if we reinvested that back into the sales team?

14:56 to grow even faster and get that much more market share. And so you have an entire economy of company making the uh of companies making those individual decisions of do you bank the profit or do you use it to go and accelerate growth. And what we what we tend to know from history is that the companies that get too greedy on the profit side You just end up leaving yourself vulnerable to being outflanked by competitors. So, you know, capitalism has a pretty pretty, you know, convenient almost driving the the sort of productivity gains of these types of innovations to get reinvested back into the business. You've been talking about running box in an AI first way and and encouraging other leaders to do it. Are you like

15:36 Shopify and Duolingo announced that staffers have to justify anything that's not AI produced. Like what what does AI first mean? Yeah. So for us AI first means that We want to use AI as a means of driving An acceleration of the customer outcome, an acceleration of decision making, an acceleration of building new features. So just think about it as mostly a metric of speed. On one hand, you could think about AI as going after like a mass of work.

16:05 And you could say AI is gonna you know, remove some part of that massive work and do it instantly. So the massive work goes down. Or think about work as a timeline and not a mass. All we're doing is trying to get through each step so that way we get to the next step. And then and and so on.

16:21 And everything's faster. So I wanna have us use AI to move faster down the timeline, not just purely to reduce the total mass of work that we're doing. There's probably one pronounced difference versus let's say the Duolingo memo. There's some emerging idea which is sort of you have to prove that AI can't do this thing. for for you to get then headcount.

16:43 And and my my general our general instinct is actually the opposite. If you can prove that you can use AI Then that's actually when you will get headcount. Because what we want is we want the dollars of the business to go back into the areas that are the increasing areas of productivity gain because those areas will then be higher higher ROI for us over time. Mm I worked for a while the place where our our whole job was to create the piles of cash for us to bring over to someone else. And it w it was a frustrating way to be. But what you don't want is you don't want

17:15 You don't want to develop any um kind of accidental uh disincentive, right, for for AI adoption. If you kind of Make it so When AI can't do something for you, that's the you you kind of get this kind of benefit of more budget. That's obviously, you know, would create

17:31 you know, a perverse incentive. You'd actually rather just say, Okay, we want every org to be AI first, and the ones that are even more AI first will be the areas that we probably prioritize, you know, with with additional resources. I love how Aaron meshes his understanding of AI development with business realities, incentives, investments, how greed can propel both missteps and opportunities. I also love his personal stories about how he uses AI and how specific conversations with clients are shifting his priorities. So what kind of best practices does he offer for keeping up to date on AI shifts? And is China really an AI threat or not? We'll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

18:23 Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show. Because every Friday we release a second rapid response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.

19:05 Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone.

19:28 Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Before the break, Aaron Levy of Box talked about how AI and AI agents are poised to change enterprises. Now he talks about what it takes to keep up with a constant flood of AI advances, the risks posed by China and by tariffs, and how AI will change our society in the next 12 months. Let's dive back in.

20:07 You guys work with With everyone. With all the models, OpenAI, Google, Amazon, new models New products come out like every day, like constantly. H how do you

20:20 Personally stay caught up? This part has exceeded my uh my highest expectations of the amount of Of of just di dynamism in this space.

20:32 Our only historical context for this many platforms competing are like in these early stages of OS wars. Device wars and so on. There's usually only two to three credible players that that kinda take the attention of the market. We have somehow ended up in a category where There's arguably five to six players.

20:53 All of which you could throw a dart on a dartboard and they will have the leading AI model for some at least brief kind of period of time. And and the the leapfrogging is sort of happening At no greater pace than than on a monthly basis.

21:09 So so that means that you have every week something is happening that is causing, you know, this category to shift in some direction. You could possibly just say, You know what, then I'm just like gonna not pay attention because it's moving so fast. We don't have that we don't have that um uh that benefit'cause because our customers rely on us to know what what the heck is going on. So then you have to do the inverse, which is we're just you know, drinking from the fire hose of constant information uh coming at us. I mean, we'll we'll be on it Saturday ten PM

21:42 preparing for a Monday release of an AI model because we're we're doing the finishing touches of our, you know, evaluation of that model and we wanna get in the hands of customers and we wanna make sure that everybody knows the benchmarks of it. Having done this now for twenty years. Uh starting right at the at the start of the cloud, seeing the iPhone, seeing the iPad. This is absolutely the fastest I've ever seen tech move by at least five to ten X. The craziest I've ever seen this industry and the hardest I think anybody's had to work just to stay up to speed with everything going on.

22:13 And Do you have a a strategy about how you Personally do that or you just don't sleep? It is possible to get eight hours of sleep in this environment, but it's not possible to have any hobbies. So so so you you you can either choose hobbies or sleep. And most most people are probably choosing sleep over hobbies, but like something will happen at

22:33 ten PM and there'll be like a a group chat with with AI friends, everybody's blowing up like oh my God, I can't believe this just happened. And then it'll be an internal slack with, you know, 15 people on the AI team of oh god, we have to jump on this. And it's just like you know Hope everybody has you know had their family dinner and that's all behind them'cause now we're we're back we're we're back wired in on uh on what's happening. And and y you're not gonna uh spend two hours working out that uh that next morning. You're just you just gotta get right back to it. No, I think if you have like twelve minutes to lift some weights, you're good. So

23:06 Ами овдес. rapid and radical technology change, of course w we're seeing a lot of other cultural change. Another topic I saw a lot in your social feeds, I guess on X is tariffs. Now you're you're in digital product, so theoretically you'd feel less whiplash about tariffs, but you've gone right at the Trump administration about them. Why? Is that because of what you hear from clients? the reason why I was outspoken a against them is

23:35 I I just like fundamentally don't like tariffs. You know, bo box or not box. I I think that the the the market does better w with as few kind of market distortions as possible or economic distortions as possible. Fortunately things are seem to be trending in in a in a kind of winding down direction. But take any kind of punitive tariff. above I don't know, thirty percent on a country. You've now inflated your cost of serving

24:01 in a particular category or industry. So all of a sudden the goods and services that you're building that coming out of your country now have this this built in Cost increase. that no other competitor deals with, does that increase the odds that you win in a particular industry or decrease the odds? Anything that creates a a an artificial increase in costs by definition You know, causes you to slow down relative to your

24:25 alternative competitors. Which is You know, e equally why I'm very much on the Other side of the spectrum. of normally my my democrat views on things like regulation, because regulation is equally an artificial increase in the cost of executing in a particular industry.

24:42 Tariffs are a way of of increasing the costs. Regulations are a way of increasing the costs. I'm anti cost increase. I I I certainly have found myself in this environment being more libertarian than the people that I thought were libertarian. And uh I guess that's one one sort of virtue of uh of of the Trump administration so far. Yeah, I mean there there's been talk about Tech leaders sort of.

25:04 Bending the knee to Trump. Starting with the inauguration, maybe maybe bending their values too. How do you Calibrate your sort of your personal views. With Like

25:15 What the company's values are. That some other CES are struggle with. Yeah, I think I think Maybe by being a founder I I I have less of the struggle'cause I I can get away probably with more or maybe even more than I should probably be able to get away with. In general, the the default Um

25:36 Disclaimer is that these are my views. These are not like the box official like put our logo on it views. These are just Aaron's views about a thing. And um uh And and you're not worried about the administration making trouble for you because of that. I'm not worried in terms of like I lose sleep over that. Um, but I also I also have I've evolved my personal ability to get

25:58 Kind of like like uh aggravated quickly about about everything happening. I'm speaking out on a handful of topics that that I think matter uh to the country economically and and then I'm but but like I'm I'm trying to be balanced. I do think that we could spend less money in the government and get more out of it. Some components of Doge. I I I've I felt made sense. And then on areas like tariffs where I just think it's an economic disaster, I'm gonna be clear that like I think that's a really bad idea. And d do you have a uh conviction yet about what Trump's impact on AI is gonna be, whether that's regulatory, competition with China. I know you've been pretty positive about

26:39 Deep seek. Some s some people see that as evidence of China's ascension, something to be to be afraid of. I'm Weirdly less afraid of China. I have not gotten bitten by the by the sort of be deeply afraid of China bug. People can definitely

26:55 Call me an idiot if things go really, really you know you know, poorly with them. I think there's some huge hugely bad problems with China. The hacking issues are a huge problem. IP issues in China are a huge problem. I don't have the oh my God, if they win AI, it's all over. I have the reverse though, which is which is We should win AI Because

27:16 Economically. more of the profits are gonna accrue to your economy. When I think about the you know, this administration's approach to AI. There are some incremental positives. relative to the Biden administration. So so there there's a general bias toward supporting things like open source AI.

27:35 There's a general bias toward not trying to overly lock down AI, but actually let let AI get more diffuse because you you eventually innovate faster when there's more more kinda angles testing your your systems. I give um this administration Decently high marks on AI policy thus far. That could change, of course, but but but you know, I I feel more comfortable

28:00 at the moment on AI, you know, than than the number of other topics. winning the AI war like how much of that is reliant on you know continuing to attract high skilled uh immigration. I mean that the the Trump administration's Immigration policy is sort of at odds with the division of of

28:20 This being a destination. So if you want to win an AI You know, my My wish list is support open source AI. Check. Um

28:29 Uh rapidly accelerate the development of of chips in the US. And and and make sure we can control that that infrastructure as much as possible over time. Sort of check. Uh tariffs are actually a headwind to that.

28:44 Don't overregulate AI. So so also check. But then you need the best talent in the world and we need a lot of it. And then that would be that would be kind of neutral to negative so far. And to be clear, Biden didn't didn't do this either. What you would do is you would just do the whole green card stamped on the diploma uh after college, and you would get anybody studying AI in the US or even, you know, computer science in the US, you would just be like, we want you here.

29:11 We're gonna build the best environment in the world for you. No need for you to go back to to your, you know, kind of country of origin. And the fear that those people are gonna take American jobs Y your point is it's gonna grow American jobs by having that kind of talent. by having those those amazing people not be in America

29:29 You over a ten year period will lose vastly more jobs. than the incremental jobs that they are theoretically taking in the near term because those people Oh. Gonna be smart in our country or a different country.

29:44 And they're gonna build AI in our country or a different country. And the country that has more of those that flywheel of the better better computer scientists doing the better algorithms that need more compute, that build better products, the flywheels that happen in other countries will mean over time more jobs go to those countries. You want the Sergei Brins. to to to build that company here. Um, you you want the Jensens to build that company here. And so you want the talent to stay here and and grow here as much as possible. You've been through

30:18 So many waves of change running. I'm curious if you have lessons or advice for other leaders today who may be struggling with The pace

30:30 You know, the sort of Feeling of chaos that That a lot of folks are Yeah. Experiencing?

30:36 I mean I think I'd probably credit to you. You kind of had this initial insight, right? The world is is is increasingly um a you know a world of acceleration. It's highly dynamic. I do believe we're in a globally interconnected world at this point. I think it's a good thing. I think it's healthy for society. I'm firmly like a ninety nine nine ninety-nine percentile optimist of of the benefit of all this. It means we'll get better cancer treatments. It means that we're you know, the people that that aren't mobile today will become mobile. We're entering this incredible era of abundance and acceleration. And and so I think the reason why I can stay up with it is because I'm excited by it all. And so I think if it was if it was

31:17 Uh If it was draining And I was I felt like like wow what like this is all bad I I think I would be, you know, fatigued and and stressed out and and burned out. But but it's to me, it's kind of the opposite. Like I grew up with technology, I fell in love with technology. I I think it's this amazing gift.

31:36 And so I'm only basically having fun. I mean, like it's stressful. It's stressful in the sense of like I need to make sure that box stays ahead of everybody else. And so like that has anxiety provoking feelings, but the excitement of the space in the field. Is what is what propels you know, I think so much of my energy. And so so to some extent, I d I think everybody has to kind of find their version of that to stay enthusiastic, to stay energized about what's what's going on. I think for anybody in technology, that should almost be coming for free because we're in the we're in the the period of the greatest amount of change in technology history and you're you're gonna be s you know able to say that you were at the center of it.

32:18 If we talk again in twelve months, or when we talk again in twelve months, What will have changed most about AI and the way we use it. For consumers Um

32:30 I think our daily lives will still Incrementally. kind of evolve. Your AI assistant in the form of Chat GBT or Perplexity or Gemini or Grok or whatever you use is just gonna be X more powerful. You know, you'll take an image of something and it'll instantly give you all the analysis you'd ever want on it.

32:47 Um, it'll generate images that are perfect. It'll give you the perfect answer to your question. The consumer world kind of have the playbook. On the enterprise, I think I think the next twelve months we should think about this as the the period where we have our chat GBT moments with AI agents. This is the first year where you could see the initial proof of concepts. But I think it's worth noting that for the enterprise adoption of AI

33:10 This is gonna be a decade long journey. Um, you know, we we we thought that like cloud computing was was like you know gonna happen in three years or five years. We're twenty years into cloud computing. And and the then the quarterly rate of cloud computing sort of adoption is st still growing at the same rates as ever before. I I think this will be much faster with AI to be very clear. But

33:32 Just so we like Shock ourselves. Imagine we're in twenty forty five. And we're still talking about You know, wow, AI, you know, was adopted in this enterprise for this thing.

33:44 Like Like think about how unbelievably crazy that as a concept sounds. That's how we are still talking about cloud today. When I go to a bank.

33:54 They'll still say we just c deployed cloud. For this trading platform. Twenty years. Twenty years into this. So these things take a while. The change management takes a while.

34:05 Partly this is why You you're seeing us and Shopify and others go in so hard on AI. You actually do have to kind of nudge and accelerate and create the permission to move faster. That's why that's why moving AI first now is a very relevant exercise because Because you do want those learning cycles to happen in your company sooner and faster than it does

34:26 you know, outside your company. Um, so you can, you know, be ahead of the curve. society in in, you know, a decade, decade and a half will look just completely different than it does today. Well, Aaron, thanks so much for doing this. This was great. Thanks, Bob. Appreciate it. Good to see you.

34:43 Aaron sees disruption as opportunity. Not that he thinks every disruption is good, tariffs are a case in point, but tech-driven disruption just gets him excited. And I think he's right, we all have to find ways to be excited about AI, even if it scares us or feels alien, because it's advancing at a pace that's hard to get your mind around. The challenges for each of us are emotional, every bit as they are, technological or intellectual. We may not want to sacrifice our sleep or our hobbies to stay up to date in these new areas, but those of us who do, who can make peace with the chaos and make it our friend, Those people will be in the best position to thrive. That Fast Company cover story I referenced that included Aaron, it talked about a concept I called generation flux.

35:32 A group of people not defined by chronological age, but by the willingness to jump in and build new skills in an environment of uncertainty. Today, because of AI and more, we all need to become part of Generation Flux. I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.

35:59 Rapid response is a wait what original. I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our producer is Alex Morris. Associate producer is Mashumaku Tonina. Mixing and Mastering by Aaron Bastonelli. Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Le Tal Malad.

36:20 For more, visit rapidresponsshow.com.