A Silicon Valley software firm is bucking the industry trend of AI-driven layoffs, building an entirely new workforce architecture around artificial intelligence and hiring more people as a result, according to New York Times report.
Box's AI Hiring Surge Defies Industry Layoff Trend
Whilst much of the technology sector has been reducing headcount and citing artificial intelligence as justification, Box — a California-based enterprise software company — has moved in the opposite direction. The firm has created 13 entirely new categories of employment because of AI, with roles that did not exist within the industry just a few years ago.
Box, which provides software for storing and managing corporate data, now employs more than 2,900 people and expects that figure to exceed 3,000 by early next year. The expansion is being driven directly by the company's dual relationship with AI: as a seller of AI-powered products and as an organisation that uses AI internally to boost workforce productivity.
"We ourselves are selling AI to our customers, so that's actually causing us to need to hire more people," said Aaron Levie, Box's chief executive. "And as a user of AI, we're getting new forms of productivity that's also causing us to hire people."
What Are the 13 New AI Job Roles Box Has Created?
The new roles span a wide spectrum of technical and operational functions. Among the positions Box has created are AI architect, AI solutions manager, AI platform leader, and senior director of AI, data and integration — a role posted in autumn of last year to help wire together internal systems so that employees could make better use of artificial intelligence tools.
Two other notable additions include "forward deployed engineers," who assist customers lacking the technical capability to adopt AI, and "AI business automation engineers," who sit within the IT department and help colleagues deploy AI to improve productivity and eliminate repetitive tasks from their daily work.
Box has also hired staff specifically to evaluate and benchmark AI models. One such employee is Sidharth Srinivasan, 23, who joined the company after graduating from Stanford University and now measures the performance of AI models to help customers determine which models are best suited for particular tasks.
"If I talked to myself two years ago, and I told myself I was working on AI evals, I would be like, what is that?" Srinivasan said. "With any technological innovation, the type of work that you have to do to adapt to that is just slightly different."
Why AI Is Creating Jobs at Box Rather Than Eliminating Them
The broader technology industry has delivered a mixed picture on AI and employment. Companies including Meta and Coinbase have announced redundancies and attributed them, at least in part, to AI-driven efficiency gains. The fear that AI will displace workers in areas such as software engineering and management has become widespread.
Yet Box illustrates a more complicated reality. Demand for cybersecurity professionals, for instance, has risen sharply because of the volume of AI-generated code that requires human vetting. Google and other large firms are actively recruiting engineers to help integrate AI into client systems.
Box's Measured Approach to Growth Has Proved an Advantage
Unlike many of its peers, Box did not dramatically expand its workforce during the pandemic years. From 2019 to 2022, its headcount grew by 20 per cent to approximately 2,500 employees. Several comparable firms doubled or tripled in size during the same period, only to follow with significant job cuts thereafter.
Box has maintained a consistent stance against large-scale redundancies. "We have never done any kind of broad-scale layoffs, and that remains a huge commitment of ours," Jessica Swank, the company's chief people officer told New York Times.
That restraint has positioned the company differently as AI becomes central to the software industry. When OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, Levie said he recognised the technology's transformative potential and moved quickly to incorporate it into Box's product suite, adding features that automate tasks such as document drafting and contract review.
The approach appears to be yielding commercial results. Box reported that its revenue in the most recent quarter rose 11 per cent year on year, its strongest rate of growth since 2022. The company's stock has declined approximately 7 per cent this year, however, reflecting broader market anxiety about whether AI might eventually make software companies like Box redundant altogether.
Levie has argued that customers will continue purchasing enterprise software from third parties rather than building their own AI-powered tools, on the grounds that external software offers greater security and reliability.
Software Engineers Are in Higher Demand, Not Lower, at Box
One of the more counterintuitive findings from Box's experience is that the arrival of sophisticated AI coding tools has not reduced the company's appetite for software engineers. Quite the opposite.
Levie explained to NYT that as AI agents become capable of performing tasks autonomously, a single software engineer can now oversee those agents and achieve outcomes that once required an entire team. That increased leverage makes each additional engineer more valuable, not less.
"A role that we're just adding more of is in core engineering," Levie said. "Now that we can basically build way more features for our customers, it actually for us is attractive to have more engineers doing that."
AI Productivity Gains Are Funding New Hires in Unexpected Areas
The efficiency that AI has generated internally at Box has also reportedly created space for the company to invest in roles it would not previously have been able to justify financially.
The firm has begun recruiting staff to market its products to specific industry sectors, a function that was previously unaffordable because it would have required too large a team to be cost-effective. AI has made the work sufficiently efficient that a small number of people can now do what once demanded many more.
"Now, you're hiring one or two to do the work of 10 because you can finally afford to do that work," Levie told New York Times.
As for how long this hiring momentum can be sustained, Levie acknowledged that the pace of AI development is the determining variable.
"It's kind of a question of, when does AI slow down?" he said. "That would be the moment when maybe you have some sort of sustaining, plateauing" of hiring.
Box was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Redwood City, California. The company serves more than 100,000 customers globally, including US federal agencies and Morgan Stanley, and has been publicly listed since 2015.
