Ben Kus

The Half Life of Agent Infrastructure — Ben Kus, Box

Aug 29, 2026 · 19:26

Ben Kus, CTO of Box, explains why AI agent infrastructure has a half-life of months, not the three-to-five years typical of enterprise software. He retracts his own graph-based agent approach from last year's talk, and recounts asking an engineer to rebuild working agentic search twice in quick succession. At Box's scale — over an exabyte of data and around a trillion tokens — models, agent design, and retrieval have each shifted repeatedly. His advice: prepare teams to expect change, build abstractions that let underlying layers be swapped, and switch only when eval sets show measurable gains in cost, speed, quality, or capability. Box now reviews every AI technology on a six-month clock, and he suggests judging vendors by how well they handled past changes.

Building an Agentic Platform — Ben Kus, CTO Box

Aug 24, 2025 · 19:06

Ben Kus, CTO of Box, argues that building an agentic architecture early was critical to overcoming the limitations of pure LLM-based data extraction for enterprise unstructured content. Starting with simple LLM calls in 2023, Box faced accuracy issues on complex documents, OCR failures, and difficulty handling hundreds of fields. They pivoted to an agentic framework using directed graphs, multi-model voting, and LM-as-a-judge with reflection loops, which dramatically improved accuracy and allowed incremental improvement. This architecture also enabled deep research on customer data and clean separation between agentic logic and system scaling. Kus emphasizes that agentic thinking should be applied early, even to seemingly non-agentic tasks like metadata extraction, and that Box avoids fine-tuning in favor of prompt-based agentic orchestration.