Aaron Levie
Co-founder and CEO of Box, the cloud content management company, who talks about enterprise AI adoption, AI agents in enterprise software and how work changes a...
“Traditionally legal review costs $2,000 per hour or $1,000 per hour for high-end work. Now the agent can do that for $5 or $10 an hour. And it just turns out that we didn't actually have as many lawyers as the world needed. It was just that they were so expensive. So nobody could actually afford them.”
a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Levie argues that hundreds of startups will each build an AI agent for one job function. His bet is that cutting the price of some kinds of labor to a tenth will reveal far more demand than anyone saw, with legal review as the example.
Transcript
…equilibrium in the economy is actually not sort of as sort of kind of perfect as we would have imagined. Where if somebody could have introduced labor at a tenth of the cost that it previously was priced at, that there would be actually 50x the demand for that particular form of labor.
That's right.
And so like you'll all of a sudden be like, okay, I'm a legal review agent. And it turns out that like traditionally legal review costs, you know, $2,000 per hour or $1,000 per hour for high-end work. Now the agent can do that for $5 or $10 an hour. And it just turns out that we didn't actually have as many lawyers as the world needed. It was just that they were so expensive. So nobody could actually afford them. And then boom, there's an explosion of this new category of
everybody's filing patents now. Everybody is going to be an investor of some sort. Yeah.
Like I can name a bunch of use cases even internally. I'm not going to give too many startup ideas out there, but I can name a bunch of ideas internally where if the cost of the particular function was a tenth of the price, we would spend, we would have many more kind of full-time people equivalent…
ceiling. There's no ceiling to the ROI potentially, right?
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