Dropbox’s CTO wants every employee at the cloud-storage company to use AI. He’s letting them find their own ways to use it
Dropbox CTO Ali Dasdan has focused on making AI tools widely available and empowering employees to experiment, rather than mandating usage from the top.
When Ali Dasdan transitioned from ZoomInfo to join Dropbox as CTO, he aimed to propel generative AI across the company's products, engineering, product, and design teams. When he took the helm in March 2025, only 40% of these teams were utilizing AI tools. To drive adoption, Dasdan focused on training, AI hackathons, championing AI superusers, and sharing quantifiable benefits.
He made ChatGPT Enterprise widely available to non-technical employees and approved AI integrations with software vendors like Workday, Slack, and Zoom. Employees created hundreds of custom applications using tools such as Lovable. A new internal platform, Nova, allows non-developers to leverage agentic AI capabilities in a secure environment.
Dasdan emphasizes the importance of AI in increasing efficiency, citing examples like faster customer support response times. He is monitoring AI usage costs and balancing them with the productivity gains from AI. Dash, Dropbox's AI-powered search tool, has been enhanced with agentic AI capabilities to help users organize, tag, rename, and search files across various platforms.
The integration of AI into Dash aims to make file searches more efficient, particularly for large files like images and videos, and automate tasks like updating file names and tagging.
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