Box CEO Aaron Levie talks Canada, AI and the future of cloud computing

If you’ve never heard of Box, you’re not alone. The cloud enterprise content management company is flying far enough under investors’ radar that when venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya named it as his top investment idea at the Sohn Investment Conference on April 23 the company’s share price shot up by more than 16 per cent in seven minutes.

While it may not have the profile of an Amazon or Google, Box does have about 80,000 clients including more than half the Fortune 500, and is positioning itself to be one of the big players in the rapidly evolving world of cloud computing by giving companies more flexibility, better security and access to artificial intelligence tools to pull useful information out of reams of data.

CEO Aaron Levie spoke to the Financial Post about the company’s plans to expand into Canada and how the company is trying to set itself apart from the competition.

You’re looking to move into Canada in a big way right now. What’s involved in that? Does a cloud computing company need a physical office in Toronto?

The reason that we’re expanding pretty dramatically in Canada is really twofold. One, there’s going to be technology that we have to leverage within in the country. So, data centres for data residency is critically important, and we have partnerships with Amazon, IBM and others. But then also, we have to make sure that we are working very closely with Canadian businesses, and that means being able to go to banks, or government institutions or media companies, and help partner with them as they’re going through this transformation.… That requires a lot of time, and a lot of consultative support for our customers, and that’s why we’re going to be expanding pretty significantly, at least in our terms, in Canada.

How does Silicon Valley see Canada? Is it an important market or just kind of the United States’ neighbour next door?

I think we see it as a continuation of the ethos and culture that we see in the valley of trying to build innovative companies. Obviously there are amazing universities in Canada for talent, and that’s pretty core to building a healthy and vibrant technology ecosystem. So I think over the next decade, we’re going to see far more partnership, far more collaboration, and far more investment in Canada than ever before.

What does Canada’s tech sector, especially when it comes to things like artificial intelligence (AI) research, mean to a company like Box? Are they competition? Are they a resource?

In general, any individual tech company benefits when there is a broad wave of investment and momentum and shared energy, and an ecosystem that develops in their space. So I think everybody is winning when Canada does well. It just advances the state of the art. It allows more knowledge transfer between organizations, between cultures. And then obviously great immigration policies within Canada, so not just the talent that is kind of homegrown, but the ability to bring people from around the world is pretty critical as well.

When it comes to cloud to computing, these days it’s a lot more than just server space in a data centre. To what extent is AI causing companies to reimagine how they work?

It’s important to note that we’re still very, very early in this transformation, but the general idea is that we’re creating and consuming insane amounts of information at this point.… You could actually have so much information that you become less productive, that it’s harder to make sense of things. That would actually be the default direction we would be going down, if we didn’t have machine learning or AI. Fortunately though, there’s another track that’s emerging which is, OK, the more data we have, the more data we can connect to other data, we can actually use that to infer more insights and be able to make better decisions and be able to correlate between different data sources and environments.

When you think of what Box is doing right now with AI, and what you’re hoping to do in the future, what’s the coolest application?

We announced a new product called Box Skills, and it takes the advancements that are happening from Google and Amazon and IBM and Microsoft and others — whether that is the ability to understand objects inside of an image, whether it’s the ability to transcribe text from a video, or the ability to process a document and pull out key topics and insights — we wanted to take all this innovation from all these different technology players and be able to plug them into Box in a seamless way. The moment you upload an image to Box, you look at it and then you forget about it for a really long time. What if you could actually pull out more value from that data, and what if you can easily discover it again when you’re looking for that image or that video or the audio transcript? So we want to help process every piece of information and data within box and make it more valuable to customers, and do so in a way that brings privacy and compliance directly into that experience.

This interview has been edited and condensed.