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BY Harry McCracken

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Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company ’s Plugged In .

Not long after ChatGPT launched, I visited Box’s Aaron Levie at his office. Looking slightly awed and conspiratorial, the CEO of the collaboration platform showed me a tech experiment he was not yet willing to make public. It involved feeding a business document that was thousands of words long into an LLM. The algorithm quickly ground all that verbiage down into a summary that was concise, clear, accurate . . . and useful.

Suddenly, I could see AI having a profound impact on how knowledge workers got stuff done that went way beyond chatbots. And the fact that Levie thought summarization would matter was one reason I took it seriously.

Levie, who cofounded Box in 2005, has long been one of the tech industry’s clearest thinkers and crispest explainers when it comes to the future of productivity.…