Dropbox CEO Drew Houston says these types of people will be the ones to benefit from AI

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston says that the winners of the AI race will have two strengths — expertise in AI and a strong command of another subject.

At the MIT AI Conference on Saturday, Houston said the "intersection is super powerful and you become very valuable because you can actually figure out how to apply the technologies to make a bunch of things in your field better."

Dropbox, the cloud-based storage service that Houston co-founded in 2007, is riding the generative AI wave. Earlier this month, it launched "Dash for Business" a new AI-powered search tool that helps teams to "search, organize, share, and protect content" across all their apps.

Houston said he initially built a search engine years ago after getting "really annoyed" about how difficult it was to search across documents, emails, or Slack messages. The launch of ChatGPT turbocharged the process by making it easier to search with natural language, he said.

During Dropbox's last round of layoffs in April 2023 — when the company cut about 16% of its workforce — Houston also acknowledged the impact of AI on the business landscape.

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