Leaders from Box, Meta, and LinkedIn talk about how AI is reshaping the future of work
Leaders from Box, Meta, and LinkedIn talk about how AI is reshaping the future of work
By Robert Safian | Published: 2025-10-27 19:30:00 | Source: Fast Company – technology
Artificial Intelligence is fundamentally changing the future of the workplace – from redefining jobs to fueling the rise of the so-called “Workslop.” On stage at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco, Box CEO Aaron Levy, LinkedIn’s Chief Economic Opportunity Officer Anish Raman, and Meta’s Chief Business Officer Clara Shih share their insider perspectives on AI optimism, uncertainty, and navigating this unprecedented era.
This is a brief transcript of an interview with Rapid responsehosted by the former Fast company editor Bob Sofiane and recorded live at the 2025 Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. From the team behind Master’s degree in size podcast, Rapid response Features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders who are tackling challenges in real time. Subscribe to Rapid response Wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode
Anish, there is a real debate about the impact of AI on business. Some say it will be positive, others say it will be negative. I said it would be amazing. Why?
Raman: I’m on LinkedIn. We are, if nothing else, a platform for people. We go where the species goes. So, for two years, I thought about human intelligence as my primary focus. . . . For humans, work has been rather bad since the industrial age. We have transformed ourselves into efficient machines. Whether you’re on the assembly line or sending emails, it’s more, better, faster. More, better, faster. . . . This is not who humans are. Artificial intelligence will outpace our efficiency. Robots will overtake us.
This is good. “We became the superior species — not because we were the most efficient, but because we were the most creative and the most innovative… AI will finally force us to expand our view of human intelligence. And I’m pessimistic about our state of readiness for that because they’re completely new systems of education, employment, and entrepreneurship. But we’re going to have to fix that, and that’s great, I think.”
Clara, we’ve heard this term that’s become very popular: “work process.” And the work generated by artificial intelligence creates more work. It’s like volume over quality. . . . Is Workslop just a stage for artificial intelligence? Is it like a bug that we’re going to fix, or is this a feature and something that we’re always going to have to be vigilant about when we’re in a world where so much can be created so easily?
Shih: I think there was always a glitch in the business. I’ve been in charge of some work, especially at the beginning of my career. I definitely think AI facilitates the creation of a lot of workshops, just like any new technology. I can imagine the first spreadsheets, when they were invented, people weren’t sure how to use them. The features may not have included formula checking, so there may have been some bad and incorrect spreadsheets. The same thing is happening now
Raman: Like any tool, use it. Do not abuse it. Don’t overuse it. There is already a lot of research. MIT has great research into brain scans that if you overuse AI, it will sap your ability to develop critical thinking skills. AI helps people get started, but if everyone uses it across the team, sameness will creep in. So, it’s all about how you use it.
Aaron, you founded Box. You know how important and distinctive culture is in an organization. Every company is different. “All of our cultures – each one is different. When we add AI agents to our business, do we need to mentor them like we do new hires? If we all use off-the-shelf AI, will we end up with an off-the-shelf culture?”
Levy: certainly. And by the way, I’m actually pretty good at handling a lot of the work steps because all I see are a lot of files that are going to be created.
And that’s good for you
Levy: I think everyone here is familiar with context engineering. “It’s kind of a simple analogy — which is if you have an employee on the street, a super-intelligent person, who doesn’t know what kind of job they’re in. They just show up. And you’re, like, ‘Okay, today you’re a lawyer and the next day you’re a marketer, and the next day you’re a programmer.’ That’s the kind of AI model. And so you have to give it the context it needs to be able to do its job.”
And perhaps, in fact, ironically, you’ll have to get more context than the person might get. In fact, it’s very easy for an employee to pick up on the general cultural kind of work norms and practices, because they can just look at another person and say, “Oh, I see the way you just collaborated over there.” And so we rely on a collaborative culture rather than making really quick decisions and then moving on. Again, the AI agent doesn’t know: “Did you just join SpaceX, or did you just join Patagonia?” I suppose these are two different ends of the cultural spectrum. So you’ll have to effectively tell the agent, like, “Who are you now?” These are the standards in our organization, and this is the context of the business process in which you are involved.”
Clara, I spoke with a CEO last week who said he’s under pressure to adopt AI in areas he’s not sure are actually beneficial to the company. But he feels like, “Oh, I’m getting this push from different parts of the organization, from investors, from the board.” So how do leaders balance “I should be into this” versus “It’s not showing any measurable impact yet”?
Shih: I see this all the time from different leaders I meet. I think first you have to do the hands-on training and actually get in there and understand the capabilities. Because I think that through this judgment, through this direct experience, only then can leaders really know: “Okay, I want this here but not here.” Another great success formula is to break up the team and have people focus on immediate use cases. What can I open today that will show me the ROI this quarter, next quarter, versus what are the bigger bets where I see the secular trend and we should skate to where the puck game is headed?
Levi: This is the dilemma that many existing institutions will fall into, including us. When I go around and try to talk about the kind of processes that we can automate, I think there’s this idea that we have this kind of ideal vision of the end state of AI that can do anything and can automate anything. The reality is that if you drop AI into today’s business processes, it will do very little, and you’ll actually have to re-engineer your workflow and you’ll have to re-engineer your process. I think a lot of times, unfortunately, you’ll see people trying to drop AI into a process that, even with the best automation, you’ll get a gain of 10% or so from that workflow.
It doesn’t change the world.
Levy: It doesn’t change the world, but that’s because you haven’t thought about re-engineering your AI workflow. And we thought that AI would work the way we do. It turns out that we may have to work the way AI works, and we have to be of service to the agent to make it more productive – as opposed to this unfortunate reality where we might have thought it would make us productive.
It’s a bit terrifying. Your mission is to make AI more productive?
Levy: completely. Well, there was someone offsite 15 years ago where one of our engineering managers told me about the inverted pyramid. His mission is to empower all the people who are technically below him in the hierarchy, but to be as productive as possible. This was a bit of a coup, as it works to their advantage to make them as efficient as possible. The reality is that this is what we will be doing with AI agents for some time, because we will be making them effective. . . . And if you look at startups with five, ten, and twenty people that are entirely AI-driven, they don’t have a single business process. That’s basically what they do. They’re working to support agents to be very effective, and that’s just a completely different way of working.
Raman: Make them more productive to make you more influential.
Shih: Yes. Help me help me.
Raman: I think we should be positively pro-human. It’s hard to say how extreme it is.
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