This Silicon Valley company created 13 new job types because of AI: What are they? Why the firm is still hiring?
A software company in Silicon Valley is bucking the industry trend of AI-driven layoffs, building an entirely new workforce architecture around AI and hiring more people as a result. New York Times report.
Box’s AI Hiring Surge Challenges Industry Layoff Trend
While much of the tech industry is reducing headcount and citing artificial intelligence as the reason, Box, a California-based enterprise software company, has moved in the opposite direction. Thanks to artificial intelligence, the firm has created 13 completely new employment categories with roles that did not exist in the industry a few years ago.
Box, which provides software to store and manage enterprise data, currently employs more than 2,900 people and expects that figure to exceed 3,000 by early next year. The expansion stems directly from the company’s dual relationship with AI: as a vendor of AI-powered products and as an organization that uses AI internally to improve workforce productivity.
“We ourselves are selling AI to our customers, which actually results in us having to hire more people,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie. “And as a user of AI, we get new forms of productivity that also cause us to hire people.”
What Are the 13 New AI Job Roles Created by the Box?
The new roles cover a wide range of technical and operational functions. Positions created by Box include AI architect, AI solutions manager, AI platform leader and senior director of AI, data and integration. This position was appointed in the fall of last year to help bring together internal systems so employees could better use AI tools.
Two other notable additions include “forward-deployed engineers,” who help customers who lack the technical capacity to adopt AI, and “AI business automation engineers,” who sit in the IT department and help co-workers deploy AI to increase productivity and eliminate repetitive tasks in their daily work.
Box has also hired staff specifically to evaluate and benchmark AI models. One of those employees is Sidharth Srinivasan, 23, who joined the company after graduating from Stanford University and measures the performance of AI models to help customers determine which models are best suited to specific tasks.
“If I were talking to myself two years ago and said I was working on AI evaluations, I would say: What is this?” Srinivasan said. “With any technological innovation, the type of work you have to do to adapt to it is a little different.”
Why Is AI Creating Jobs in Box Instead of Eliminating Jobs?
More broadly, the tech industry has presented a mixed picture regarding AI and employment. Companies like Meta and Coinbase announced layoffs and attributed them, at least in part, to AI-driven productivity gains. Fear that artificial intelligence will displace workers in fields such as software engineering and management has become widespread.
But Box illustrates a more complex truth. For example, the demand for cybersecurity experts has increased sharply due to the volume of code generated by AI that requires human review. Google and other large firms are actively hiring engineers to help integrate AI into client systems.
Box’s Measured Growth Approach Provided Advantage
Unlike many of its peers, Box did not significantly increase its workforce during the pandemic years. From 2019 to 2022, the number of employees increased by 20 percent, reaching approximately 2,500 employees. Many similar firms doubled or tripled in size over the same period, but then experienced significant layoffs.
Box has taken a consistent stance against large-scale layoffs. “We have never done a large-scale layoff, and this remains a major commitment for us,” said Jessica Swank, the company’s chief people officer. New York Times.
This restriction put the company in a different position as artificial intelligence became the center of the software industry. When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, Levie said it recognized the technology’s transformative potential and moved quickly to incorporate it into Box’s suite of products, adding features that automate tasks like document drafting and contract review.
The approach appears to produce business results. Box reported that its revenue rose 11 percent year-on-year in the latest quarter, the strongest growth rate since 2022. But the company’s shares are down nearly 7 percent this year. But this reflects broader market concern about whether artificial intelligence will eventually make software companies like Box completely redundant.
Levie argued that customers will continue to purchase 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, Not Less, Demand at Box
One of the counterintuitive findings from Box’s experience is that the advent of advanced AI coding tools has not diminished the company’s appetite for software engineers. Quite the opposite.
Levi explained. NYT As AI agents become capable of performing tasks autonomously, a single software engineer will now be able to oversee these agents and achieve results that once required an entire team. This increased leverage makes each additional engineer more valuable, not less.
“One role we are adding more to is basic engineering,” Levie said. “Now that we can basically build a lot more features for our customers, it’s attractive for us to have more engineers actually doing that.”
AI Productivity Gains Fund New Hire in Unexpected Fields
It has also been reported that the efficiencies that AI has generated internally at Box have created room for the company to invest in roles it could not previously financially justify.
The company began recruiting staff to market its products to specific industry sectors; This was a function that had previously been unaffordable because it required too large a team to be cost-effective. Artificial intelligence has made work so efficient that a small number of people can now do work that once required many more.
“Now you hire one or two people for the job of 10 people because you can finally afford to do the job,” Levie said. New York Times.
As for how long this hiring momentum can be sustained, Levie acknowledged that the determining variable is the pace of AI development.
“It’s kind of a question of when AI will slow down.” he said. “This could be the moment where maybe there is some kind of sustainability, a pause, in recruiting.”
Box was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Redwood City, California. The company serves more than 100,000 clients worldwide, including U.S. federal agencies and Morgan Stanley, and has been publicly traded since 2015.
