Slack, Box CEOs say bots will ease info overload

Stewart Butterfield (left), CEO of Slack, talks about the future of work with Box CEO Aaron Levie. "We need self-driving Ubers, like now," said Levie, 30, referencing the ride-sharing company's Thursday announcement that it would soon begin testing autonomous Volvos in Pittsburgh. Apparently, Levie's Uber driver got lost en route to this lunchtime session Friday on the future of work, a discussion organized for a few journalists featuring Levie and Stewart Butterfield, 43, CEO of messaging platform Slack. Over the next hour, the two startup entrepreneurs discussed how workplace expectations have been upended by increasingly easy access to information; how work-life balance rules may need to be rewritten; and how artificial intelligence will be able to bail us out of information overload. "I'd say right now (workplace tools) are a net cultural positive, but we're also going to have to learn how to handle it," said Butterfield, who added that his company instituted a Do Not Disturb feature not to allow workers to shirk responsibility but rather to create a work-life divide.