Dropbox CTO Ali Dasdan lifts AI adoption from under 40% to full

Ali Dasdan joined Dropbox as CTO in March 2025, coming from ZoomInfo with plans to start his own agentic AI company before Dropbox CEO Drew Houston convinced him to join. At the time, less than 40% of Dropbox's engineering, product, and design teams were using AI tools. Dasdan achieved full adoption across that population by focusing on training, hackathons, AI superusers, and clear metrics on how tools like Claude, Codex, and Cursor speed up work.

The approach Dasdan describes is deliberately bottom-up: leadership removes barriers, and employees experiment on their own. Beyond engineering, Dropbox made ChatGPT Enterprise widely available and approved AI features in Workday, Slack, and Zoom. Non-technical workers have used Lovable to build their own applications, and the company created Nova, an internal platform for coding agents that non-developers can also access in a monitored environment. This reflects a broader pattern where AI spending is moving outside IT budgets, though Dasdan acknowledges token costs are a budget item every department must measure as usage grows.

The stakes for Dropbox hinge on whether this decentralized model produces sustained efficiency gains in customer support and security work without creating cost or compliance problems. For other companies watching, the question is whether letting employees pick their own AI tools at scale delivers results or creates unmanaged risk.