Box barely beats the Street’s expectations and nervy investors back away
Shares of the cloud content management firm Box Inc. headed lower in extended trading today after it barely scraped past Wall Street’s earnings and revenue targets in its first quarter.
The company reported adjusted earnings of 37 cents per share, coming in just ahead of the analyst consensus estimate of 36 cents. Meanwhile, revenue for the period rose 11%, to $305.9 million, edging past the Street’s forecast of $304 million. All told, Box reported net income of $17.7 million in the quarter, up from just $8.1 million in the year-ago period.
Chief Executive Aaron Levie (pictured) said more enterprises are turning to the premium version of Box’s Intelligent Context Management platform to unlock the value of their unstructured data for artificial intelligence workloads. “Customers are adopting Enterprise Advanced to manage and connect their organization’s unique content to AI agents., allowing them to securely build intelligent workflows, automate work, and accelerate decision-making at scale,” he said.
The fact that Levie sees AI as a growth driver for Box has done little to ease investor’s fears that large language models may be about to eat the company’s lunch, though. This year, the shares of software firms including Box have come under intense pressure. The concern is that, as AI becomes more capable, there’s less need for enterprise workers to interact with the underlying software platforms. They’ll simply be able to tell autonomous AI agents what they want to do, and everything will be automated. Some even believe that agents could replace legacy software altogether, simply by building their own platforms, though many think that’s unlikely.
