The alpha, twice a week
That was 3 min.
Get the best new moments in your inbox every Wednesday and Saturday. It's free.
Check your inbox
We sent a link to your address. Click it to finish signing up. Not there in a minute? Look in spam.
or
The Logan Bartlett Show · 3 min · Mar 28, 2025
Business agents have clearer product-market fit than consumer agents
Aaron Levie cites demand in sales, coding and document workflows, while saying consumer agents have less traction.
In this episode
Full analysis- 13:09AI agents can expand software into service budgets4 min
- 26:56Enterprise AI demand is unlike early cloud adoption4 min
- 38:45AI-generated software does not remove customer responsibility5 min
- 2:06Standalone model vendors face a pricing squeeze4 min
- 8:28Business agents have clearer product-market fit than consumer agents3 min
- 18:21AI products can build switching costs through accumulated learning8 min
- 34:45Fast-moving AI layers should stay replaceable3 min
- 53:28Topic-specific hubs give enterprise AI a clearer source of truth3 min
“Mostly our problem is we can't keep up with all the range of use cases customers want.”
Takeaways
- Outbound sales agents are finding traction in lead generation.
- Coding agents can handle internal tools that teams might otherwise leave undone.
- Box sees more demand for document workflows than it can currently satisfy.
About this segment
Aaron Levie cites demand in sales, coding and document workflows, while saying consumer agents have less traction. Box cannot keep up with the range of customer requests for document automation.
Aaron Levie is cofounder and CEO of Box.
Logan Bartlett, Host · Managing director, Redpoint Ventures
Backs enterprise software companies like Ramp, Cribl, Cyera and Legora.
From “Box CEO on Enterprise AI Trends No One is Talking About Yet”, Mar 28, 2025. Watch the full episode
Answers “Are AI agents ready for real work?” See all 104 answers
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 8:40
through. I get the feeling you're excited about agents if I read your tweets. Is there an agent that you think has product market fit today? Yes. But a couple of things. I think that I don't know if everybody's equally defining agents in the same way, but I'll give you like three or four. So, you know, one company that I happen to be an investor in, but I think they just independently, you'd probably agree, is this sort of space around outbound selling.
- 9:18
So one company is 11X. I think there's others that are good. And I think they've tapped into, you know, maybe the product market fit right now is like lead gen. And then it kind of expands from there. But for all intents and purposes, people are using this to augment, you know, their sales capacity, you know, generate more demand. That seems to be working. I think, like, writ large coding agents, you know, seem to be working. Again, maybe we could define different levels of agenticness.
- 9:45
Um, uh, but, but what you're seeing in, you know, cursor, windsurf, uh, replit, you know, level of bolt, et cetera, like obviously, you know, probably different use cases, like probably 80% of the vibe coding is more fun and it's interesting to watch and not going into production, but I could see a lot of, you know, product market fit for, Hey, I have this internal it tool. It's not, you know, not the most strategic thing we have to do.
- 10:08
I can have an agent kind of write it or modify it. and then boom, I've just solved that problem that used to maybe go to low-code tools or you'd either never solve or you might hire a contract firm and it would take six months to go build. So I'd say that's product market fit. On our end, we have one of our first kind of agentic use cases in just the fact that it's not kind of a single one-shot in the model is just we extract data from documents so then you can say, hey, here's a contract, here's an invoice.
- 10:41
I want to read the document, put that into a database, and then automate a workflow around it. That's clearly got, at least in our world, product market fit. Mostly our problem is we can't keep up with all the range of use cases customers want. And so there's more demand than the ability to satisfy everything that the customers are asking for. But those are a few. On the consumer side, I'd say probably not a lot of PMF on agents.
- 11:10
But on business, you know, it's my bet was this two years ago. My bet will probably be it in five years from now. We are probably, you know, we're probably over indexed on on the flashiest parts of AI in the consumer world and then under indexed on the things that will just make, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars in B2B. And like, I'm sure like Nikita is like.