Agent identities is going to be a super fun and hard problem for software in the coming years. Most agentic systems today assume that the agent can do everything the user can do, and just operate as an extension of that user. This has worked well and is how most auth has worked for cloud software, and it has made integrations super easy over time. But then comes along systems like Openclaw, and suddenly we get a new view into what becomes possible with agents that can operate on their own. And when you have many of them running in parallel. You start to work with them like a colleague, not just as an extension of what you do. But of course this now introduces an all new complexity than the traditional approach. What if you want an agent to access only a small subset of your data? What if you want an agent to have its own sandbox to operate in without any risk of a blast radius if it goes off the rails? What if you want to create an agent that can work with others, without you seeing everything it’s doing? For all of these cases, agents will start to need their own identities inside of platforms. To do this, we likely will need new mental models for how we delegate controls and access to them, how you handle authentication, who gets to manage them in an organization and so on. Lots to figure out in this space right now.
The future of work will look something like what Boris is describing. Anthropic is hiring engineers because people who know what they’re doing still have to tell the agents what to do, review their work, and integrate that work into...
Eventually, as a result of the context limitations of AI agents, we’ll start to change and improve our work practices to aid in their success. One of the most interesting issues with AI agents is because of their inherently limited...
File systems are an agent’s natural work environment. The ability to process and create unstructured data allow agents to bring automation to most areas of knowledge work. Now you can easily integrate Box as a cloud filesystem into deepagents from...
When thinking through the future of software, it’s helpful to think through what will we produce more of vs. less of in the future due to agents. And what systems are tied to that production or consumption. Whether it’s a new...
The effective use of agents is creating one of the widest spreads in output productivity we’ve seen on a per role basis. We didn’t see this with chatbots previously. Chatbots probably sped up work by maybe 10-20% in most cases...
Every piece of enterprise software has to become a platform play in some capacity. We’re moving to a world where agents will do vastly more work with tools and data than people ever did. Your business model, feature set, and...
AI coding will lead to 100X more software. That to me doesn’t conclude that every customer wants to be responsible for owning and managing their own ERP. It concludes that customers will have more choice, better features, and far more...
The reason we’re all in on AI agents at Box is because agents can now process all of the unstructured data in an enterprise at scale. Companies are sitting on mountains of valuable information that they can tap into for...
You used to ask people on your team “what are you constrained by” and the bottlenecks would be process, lack of certain talent, waiting on some other function to do its work, and so on. Increasingly, the right question is...