Why the "SaaS is dead" narrative is completely wrong - Aaron Levie [box]

Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with Aaron Levie, the co-founder and CEO of Box, who has rapidly transitioned his enterprise platform from a pure SaaS model into a cutting-edge playground for autonomous AI agents.

Aaron has a masterclass view of the data infrastructure that legacy tech giants wish they controlled. In this conversation, we pull back the curtain on the high-stakes battle for sovereign AI.

We unpack the real fallout of the U.S. government's unprecedented export controls on Anthropic's frontier models, why data platforms like Snowflake are posting blockbuster quarters amidst the AI boom, and how specialized tools like Cursor show that the future of intelligence is multifaceted, not winner-take-all.

If you want to understand where the real economic value of applied AI resides over the next decade, this is the blueprint.

In this masterclass, we break down:

• The Export-Control Precedent: Inside the unprecedented restriction of Anthropic's frontier model from non-US users and why Aaron calls it a brand-new moment in AI regulation.
• The Safety-Rhetoric Boomerang: How AI safety messaging scared the government into a model-approval pipeline — and why some safety advocates may quietly prefer that outcome.
• China's $50B Scenario: Why Aaron believes China can simply throw $50B at compute to stay in the race and why France, Japan, the UK, and Germany may be forced to build their own sovereign models.
• The Multifaceted Intelligence Future: Why the AI market won't be "winner-take-all," and how Cursor's applied-layer harness (routing tasks across cheap and premium models) became the template.
• Building for Machine Users: How Box adapted its file system MCP server, CLI, Markdown editing, HTML compatibility so agents and people work off the same data.
• Why More Agents Make SaaS More Valuable: Why deploying 100x more agents than employees increases the value of the underlying CRM, ERP, and content systems instead of killing them.
• The CS-Grad Dislocation: A grounded look at the shifting job market away from Big Tech layoffs and into AI startups and industries like life sciences and manufacturing.

TIMELINE :

• 00:00 – Turning Box from SaaS into an AI agent platform
• 03:00 – Sovereign AI: why countries will build their own models
• 05:51 – Can open and Chinese models catch up to the frontier?
• 08:51 – The chip embargo debate and Jensen Huang's argument
• 14:09 – AI safety, regulation, and government model approval
• 18:29 – Why AI won't be winner-take-all (the Cursor case study)
• 21:33 – How Box built a file system for AI agents
• 27:17 – Is SaaS dead? Why agents make software more valuable
• 30:48 – Will AI replace jobs? The truth about CS grads