Box CEO Aaron Levie says the company keeps a list of who burns the most tokens — not to encourage more spending, but to check whether the usage is waste or a practice worth demonstrating to everyone else. He describes pulling a team into a room within six hours to watch one colleague work, reports two-to-threefold gains in delivered customer-facing functionality in parts of the stack, and explains why Box will not drop code review.
On Training Data, Box CEO Aaron Levie describes how his customers actually pick models: a default for asking questions of their files, and hard-nosed accuracy evaluations for the high-volume extraction work where most tokens are spent. He endorses Decagon founder Jesse Zhang's argument that mature workflows migrate to open-weight models, and explains why the big labs' revenue and open-weight token volume can climb at the same time.
On Sequoia's Training Data podcast, Box CEO Aaron Levie said any company sitting on customers' data now has two obligations: build an agent measurably better than an off-the-shelf one at its own workflows, and expose the same capabilities to outside assistants like Claude and ChatGPT. He described the tuned search-and-retrieval harness behind Box's agent, the evaluations that track model progress, and his bet that within five years roughly 90% of enterprise tokens will be spent on work nobody asked for directly.
On Sequoia's Training Data podcast, Box chief executive Aaron Levie explains why AI swept through software engineering and is moving far more slowly through legal work, sales and the rest of knowledge work: code is text, engineers fix their own broken connections, and their work already lives in GitHub. His conclusion is that the tedious work of getting AI into other people's workflows — not the models themselves — is where he is betting the money is.
A civil engineer called into the Moonshots AMA to ask why two data buyers had shown interest in his 30-year project archive and then gone quiet for weeks. The panel's answer: they are not haggling, they are overwhelmed — so put the archive in a package with a price on it.
Anthropic's Fable 5.1 charges $0.25 per million tokens for cached reads, a quarter of the previous rate, which one Moonshots panelist read as an invitation to load an entire company's context into the model and keep it there. The panel connected that price to a wider scramble: with model leads lasting about a month, the labs are racing to convert them into customer workflows, partnerships and proprietary design data that a rival cannot copy.
An engineer who faked a missing editing feature using comment fields told Peregrine what to build next. A hurricane simulator stayed with one city. Co-founders Nick Noone and Ben Rudolph describe how they decide which piece of field improvisation becomes a product — and what they say it now costs to serve a city this way.
On the Training Data podcast, Peregrine co-founder Ben Rudolph describes building the company's first operational AI agent with a police customer that had worked a case ending in the exoneration of a wrongly convicted man, then asked whether an agent could reproduce the same findings. He says the agent, which runs for 30 to 60 minutes over hundreds of gigabytes of case evidence, is now used in a few US departments, including a Wisconsin county where a handful of phone records helped place a suspect. Co-founder Nick Noone says the company deliberately lets customers take the credit.
On The Diary of a CEO, the host describes a test he ran a couple of years ago: an episode of a founder-history show in which AI wrote the script and synthesized his voice, labelled as AI at the top. He says 40 to 50% of the audience reached the end of the hour. His conclusion is not that podcasting ends, but that the purely informational part of it is substitutable — and that coffee shops, workout classes, concerts and dinners gain a premium because people are there.
On the Moonshots podcast, Salim Ismail, Alex and Emad Mostaque describe the same problem from different desks: agents now produce more work than a person can review. Their answers range from designing escalation thresholds inside companies to Mostaque's decision to read his research agents' output only once a week.
On the Moonshots panel, Peter Diamandis runs a Grok Bot chief of staff called Skippy and Emad Mostaque runs 18 of them across his own machines, installing models and making art. Salim Ismail calls it the move from asking an AI to assigning work; Alex argues the messaging-app interface cannot possibly scale.
On The Diary of a CEO, critic Ed Zitron praises a chatbot for reading a troubleshooting log and for helping fix his son's Minecraft mod, then argues that neither is worth a trillion dollars. The host counters with his fiancée's one-woman business and his chief of staff's inbox. The argument turns on tokens, subscription rate limits and who is paying the real bill.