Today, Dropbox announced that they are making a pivot to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and unfortunately this will be accompanied by their lay off of 500 employees. Dropbox’s CEO and co-founder, Drew Houston said, “These changes, while painful, are essential for our future.” He further elaborated by expressing his determination to ensure that Dropbox were to lead the way in the development of AI, in the same way they were at the front during the shift to mobile and cloud computing. To gain an edge in this field, they need all their employees on board with this shift of focus to AI.
Dropbox has made use of AI-powered features since a few years ago, for instance, their well-received automatic text recognition feature which was released in 2018. It has become clear though, by the layoff of employees and replacing them with experts in AI, that the company is set on launching into the Artificial Intelligence sector.
Dropbox is a web-based file hosting service where users can store and access files from multiple devices. Founded in 2007, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdwsii created it initially as a way for users to store and sync their files on the internet. Today, Dropbox provides it’s users with a range of services that allow collaboration, data protection and cloud storage.
The person in the articles mentioned is Drew Houston, Dropbox’s CEO and co-founder. Houston has been leading Dropbox since 2007 and the company under his direction has grown to become a valued and popular service in this fast-growing sector. It is no surprise that he is determined to lead Dropbox into the future as he fully understands the importance of Artificial Intelligence in our world. His 2018 letter with Ferdowsi expressed their interest in exploring AI and believing that machine intelligence will allow Dropbox to better understand and serve their users; a vision that Drew is striving to achieve.
