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Startups must integrate AI into their workflows to be at the level of today’s competition, said Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box, a cloud storage service. “Every company is going to have to become an AI-first company,” added Levie speaking with Inc. at a session on “Navigating an AI-First Ecosystem” for National Entrepreneurship Month (watch the full interview below). “The companies that don’t do that, obviously they will slow down, they’ll fall behind, they won’t be able to as effectively serve their customers,” he said. The term AI-first refers to a company’s ability to fundamentally use AI to deliver higher productivity across the organization. While new companies will be able to implement AI from the ground up, older companies will need to rethink their workflows to incorporate it. Featured Video An Inc.com Featured Presentation Leveraging AI isn’t as simple as just dropping it into your current business model, Levie said. But he does recommend starting with two core steps. The first is figuring out whether your company can enable employees to increase productivity in their daily work, and how. For example, consider deploying an AI model through the organization, like ChatGPT or Claude, and training employees on best practices. The second step in effectively integrating AI is identifying a startup’s traditional bottlenecks that AI could help accelerate. In which areas could you apply AI in a way that would dramatically increase the output and execution? AI makes intelligence abundant, Levie said. With AI, your business isn’t limited by cost or access to resources like they may have been when seeking advice from lawyers or a marketing team. “What happens in a world where those resources are abundant and effectively near infinite?” said Levie. “How would you redesign your workflows or your business processes to take advantage of that new surplus of intelligence that is available to you?” Levie said the companies most successfully using AI have restructured in a way that best facilitates those tools. “Imagine that you do have this super-intelligent individual, and they know everything about everything,” Levie said. “The challenge is that they just showed up at your company one second ago… They don’t know what you want them to be at that moment.” The bottom line is that companies need AI, and AI needs context to be effective. If a startup can’t develop a method to implement it, Levie says it will be at risk of dropping behind. Navigating an AI-First Ecosystem: How AI Agents Will Reshape Enterprise Strategy
