Box CEO Levie: AI agents need context, unstructured data

Box CEO Aaron Levie said AI agents are more friend than foe as they make the context and unstructured data on its platform more valuable.

Levie, speaking on Box's fourth quarter earnings call, had to address a bunch of questions about the impact of LLMs on his SaaS business. After all, every SaaS CEO has to answer questions about companies like Anthropic making them extinct.

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Levie said:

"Nearly every enterprise leader that I talk to today is looking to transform how their company operates with AI. They're looking to accelerate tasks across their organizations, ranging from reviewing legal contracts and doing financial analysis to accelerating pharma research and spreading expertise across their organization.

They quickly find that for AI agents to be effective in a workflow; agents need critical context about their business. They need to understand the company's product road map, marketing strategy, HR policies, internal best practices, planning insights, strategy decisions and whatever else makes that business unique. Much of that unique context lives inside of enterprise content."

AI agents can use that enterprise content to automate knowledge work. In other words, the use cases Box can address have expanded. "To have an effective AI agent strategy, companies fundamentally need a content strategy," said Levie.

Box launched Box Extract to pull information from content and save it as metadata, Box Shield Pro and integrations with the latest models in Box AI Studio.

In the fiscal year ahead, Box will enable AI agents to carry out long-running tasks, advanced work and complete projects. Levie's bet is that fiscal 2027 will be a big year for Box Platform APIs and the move to centralize enterprise content.

Box will monetize through end-user seats interacting with agents or APIs and consumption as a headless platform. Box said it is seeing strong momentum in its Enterprise Advanced plans, which now account for 10% of revenue.

Levie said AI agents simply mean that more software will be produced. This software will need to access unstructured data with governance, security and metadata.

Box will outline the next moves for Box Automate and its overall strategy at its Investor Day on deck.

The numbers

Box reported fourth quarter earnings of 47 cents a share on revenue of $305.9 billion, up 9%. Non-GAAP earnings of 49 cents a share topped estimates.

The company ended the quarter with remaining performance obligations of $1.71 billion, up 17%. Short-term RPO was up 12%.

For fiscal 2026, Box reported earnings of 58 cents a share on revenue of $1.177 billion, up 8%.

As for the outlook, Box projected first quarter revenue of $304 million, up 10% from a year ago with non-GAAP earnings of 36 cents a share. For fiscal 2027, Box projected revenue of $1.275 billion, up 8% from a year ago, with non-GAAP earnings of $1.55 a share.

Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller said:

"Box has a record quarter and year, albeit on a low level, as growth has been in the single digits. AI may change all that, as Box has innovation all across the stack, infusing AI in all aspects of the offering. Now 2026 is all about Box keeping innovating and hitting the sweet spot with its R&D direction and what enterprises need from content management. Keep looking at the Enterprise Advanced category."

Observations

Headless deployment will become more important as business models focus on APIs. In a riff on evaluating your SaaS vendors I noted that the ability to operate headless will be important. Levie mentioned headless deployments of Box frequently. He said:

"If you were to use Box tomorrow and you deployed a fleet of agents, and they were all running around, you had 100x more agents than people in your organization. And for each of those agents, you would probably want to have a Box account of some sort. You can either have a headless Box account, you have a regular Box account you choose. And you're going to want those agents to be writing, reading, storing data, sharing with other people.

And if it's done in a headless capacity via our APIs, we have a platform business model, which is consumption oriented."

You will hear a lot more SaaS vendors talk headless deployments.

Tone around SaaS is improving. A month ago, it didn't matter what a SaaS CEO said because the conclusion that you were roadkill was already made. The last two weeks have revealed that Wall Street analysts are adopting a more nuanced argument.

Will focused SaaS players merge? Take a company like Box, which has a market cap of $3.43 billion, and merge it with Docusign with a market cap of $9.3 billion, and you have more content, context, APIs to tap and the ability to run headless. Scale matters in AI. You could also see more industry-focused SaaS acquisitions. There are a lot of mid-sized SaaS players that could scale via M&A.