Aaron Levie: Software Jobs Will Not Disappear, AI Agents Are the Greatest Leverage
Box CEO Aaron Levie emphasized in a post that software jobs will not disappear, and AI Agents represent the greatest leverage that technical personnel have ever had in history.
He believes that now is the best time to be a technical professional, as work can be accomplished at levels far beyond the past, whether individually, in teams, or at the company level; Agents will not reduce existing software but will bring over 100 times new software.
In market mechanisms, technical talent and corporate budgets are accelerating towards roles that orchestrate, manage, and integrate Agents. The demand for AI productivity tool subscriptions and technical training is rising, benefiting enterprise software platforms like Box, while purely low-level coding positions are under pressure, with capital highly concentrated on technical talent and platforms capable of managing Agents.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Aaron Levie has long observed the enterprise software ecosystem, and this viewpoint directly counters the narrative of "AI replacing programmers," emphasizing that Agents will handle a large number of legacy system migrations to the cloud, SMB digitalization, security patches, IT automation, and massive data connections—tasks that were previously difficult to accomplish due to human limitations.
In terms of capital flow, companies will shift their IT budgets from traditional development teams to a "human + Agent" hybrid model, where technical personnel will need to initiate Agents, manage tasks, orchestrate multi-Agent collaboration, and convert outputs into business value. Resources will be focused on Agent platforms, integration tools, and talent upgrades, with the strategy aimed at achieving exponential growth in software output through Agents while creating more high-value technical positions.
Similar cases include the transformation period of cloud computing where operations roles did not disappear but rather transitioned to cloud architects, as well as the early automation tools amplifying overall software demand; the current software industry is in the early stages of transitioning from labor-intensive coding to Agent-driven production.
Essentially, this is a technological substitution: repetitive low-level coding is being taken over on a large scale by Agents, with the mechanism being that after breakthroughs in large model natural language understanding and tool invocation capabilities, the scale of software production can expand 100 times, leading to a concentration of pricing power from purely execution-based programmers to technical talent who master Agent orchestration, system design, and business integration, while opening the largest leverage and opportunity window for technical personnel in history.