Area
Reporting and discussion about AI & Work, with links to the original sources.
Box CEO Aaron Levie says the company ranks employees by AI token use not to reward spending but to spot waste or workflows worth teaching others, and reports two-to-threefold gains in customer-facing features in parts of its stack.
Box CEO Aaron Levie said companies holding customers' data must build an agent provably 10–20 points better than off-the-shelf ones at their workflows and also open their APIs to Claude, ChatGPT and other assistants, or lose.
Box CEO Aaron Levie argues AI spread fastest through coding because code is text and engineers fix their own tools, while jobs like sales lag. He is betting, admittedly with bias, that the money lies in bringing AI into other workflows.
Moonshots hosts told mid-career professionals with mortgages to brainstorm spare-time AI experiments with a language model, tinker at night, find online peers, try Mercor and schedule slack time; none of it shows an income can be replaced.
Panelists on Moonshots argue that as agent compute gets cheaper, the scarce skill is choosing targets: OpenAI's claimed Navier–Stokes proof was easy to specify, but models asked for ideas to cure cancer return poor lists.
Dave Blundin of Link Ventures argues workers should aim to manage agent swarms, not one copilot. Emad Mostaque calls current job gains "the turkey before Thanksgiving"; Alexander Wissner-Gross says every profession is "cooked," in sequence.
Peregrine co-founders Nick Noone and Ben Rudolph call field engineers R&D, using their workarounds to decide what to build. They say falling costs now let them serve city agencies, but their $1m-a-year figure is ambiguous.
Peregrine's Ben Rudolph said agents running for hours write about 90% of the Python notebooks that integrate agencies' public-safety records, under deployment-team oversight — part of the preparation the podcast host put at 95% of the work.
Peregrine's Ben Rudolph says the company's first agent reproduced detectives' findings on a closed wrongful-conviction case, and it is now used in a few US departments, including a Wisconsin county where phone records helped place a suspect.
Investor David Friedberg argued AI grows companies and hiring rather than shrinking payrolls, but said his view could fail if displaced workers don't see new opportunities and choose to move to them.
Salim Ismail cited a Principal Financial Group survey of 1,000 employers to argue AI job losses aren't in the data: 1.4% reported staffing cuts they attributed to AI or automation. Most other figures were expectations, not events.
Moonshots panelists urged young people to skip PhDs, arguing the next one to three years may be the last window when humans steering AI agent fleets are unusually valuable. A panelist noted they all hold the degrees they advise skipping.