Box Brings Generative AI to Content Cloud With New Releases
Redwood City, Calif.-based Box is the latest to join the ranks of technology companies whose platforms will be powered by generative AI. Announced today, Box AI is the umbrella term for the new capabilities that will eventually bring generative AI across the entire Box Content Cloud.
Box AI Brings Generative AI to the Content Cloud
In a statement, the company stated the new modules will make it easier to uncover and share insights obtained from Box Content Cloud. As with other large language models, the AI here will be able to create new content based on data it finds in Content Cloud.
The company will preview two of the initial Box AI capabilities at the Content Cloud Summit on May 9, with the promise of more to come.
Box CTO Ben Kus explained in an emailed interview that Box AI provides the experience people have already come to expect from generative AI: a chat-like feature for people to ask questions about a document’s content and receive AI-generated responses immediately. When using a document, for example, users will be able to pose questions about the document to get deeper insights from spreadsheets, presentations, reports and other business-related content.
Users, he said, will also be able to view citations for responses, so they can trace the answer back to the source. People can also use Box AI to summarize lengthy documents, find specific information, uncover key findings and more.
Box AI in Notes, for its part, is a prompt-based tool to generate AI-powered content directly within Box Notes. The result, he said, is people can use Box AI to create content from scratch, such as meeting templates or blog posts, and refine existing content, such as edit voice and tone, make content shorter or longer, and fix spelling and grammar.
Box has also brought the new AI to bear on security, privacy and compliance. This comes as no surprise as Box has made a big effort over the years to bring enhanced security to the Content Cloud. As a result, the new AI will be governed by Box’s existing permissions that have been designed to give content owners and users control over who can do what with the content.
“We are at the start of a platform shift in enterprise software driven by recent advancements in generative AI, and nowhere is the potential impact greater than in enterprise content,” said Box CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie in a statement about the new additions. "We’ve seen a step function improvement in our ability to analyze and synthesize the massive amounts of data contained within an organization’s unique documents, videos, presentations, spreadsheets, and more."
Related Article: What Dolly 2.0 Means for the Digital Workplace
Built on OpenAI Models
The Box AI additions will be powered by advanced AI models from OpenAI, said Ben Kus, so Box customers can benefit from the latest AI technology to enhance their productivity.
He also said the company plans to bring Box AI throughout the entire Content Cloud to power more complex use cases, such as automating workflows and tasks to drive faster outcomes, powering security at scale by automatically classifying files and enhancing the developer ecosystem with access to custom APIs.
While the initial releases will be based on OpenAI models, Kus explained that Box AI builds on the platform-neutral framework that Box has been developing over the years and will continue to be enriched by applying the latest advanced intelligence models to its Content Cloud. In other words, it is likely that Box will start looking at other models in the future and will adopt and adapt them according to user needs.
Related Article: Generative AI, the Great Productivity Booster?
The Dawn of a New Era of Software?
From a broader perspective, Kus argues we are at the beginning of a new era of software.
Learning Opportunities
Drawing a parallel with previous technology trends that changed the workplace, he said AI has the opportunity to shift how we work with software going forward.
“As highlighted by the rise of generative AI, we've recently begun to see a huge breakthrough in the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs), which are now capable of bringing human-level reasoning to a large number of tasks,” he said. "Now, by default, when you interact with an AI model, you're talking to a static model that's answering questions only from its prior training set, learned by crawling what's available on the public internet.”
The technology holds enormous potential for the effective use and development of enterprise content, he continued, as it will give knowledge workers the ability to unlock the 80% of unstructured data already stored in their organization.
By safely bringing leading AI models to enterprise data, enterprises will be able to discover the deep value of their content and allow users to understand, synthesize or query information intelligently and at scale.
Related Article: How Smaller Digital Workplace Vendors Are Integrating Generative AI
Only the Start of Generative AI in the Workplace
The Box announcement comes a week after rival Dropbox announced a series of layoffs in anticipation of a shift to generative AI. Microsoft kicked off the generative AI in the workplace race following its investment in OpenAI in January, which it followed with a quick succession of announcements including its recent addition of generative AI to Viva and the introduction of generative AI to Microsoft 365 in March.
Zoom announced it would be adding generative AI to improve its video conferencing experience at the beginning of April. It also plans to add it to some of its collaboration capabilities including chats, emails and whiteboard sessions.
In the middle of March, Google announced similar generative AI features for Google Workspace, including AI-assisted text generation in Gmail, Docs and more.
At this stage, it seems there is no slowing down the development and application of generative AI to enterprise applications. What remains to be seen now is who is next.
Have a tip to share with our editorial team? Drop us a line:
About the Author
David is a European-based journalist of 35 years who has spent the last 15 following the development of workplace technologies, from the early days of document management, enterprise content management and content services. Now, with the development of new remote and hybrid work models, he covers the evolution of technologies that enable collaboration, communications and work and has recently spent a great deal of time exploring the far reaches of AI, generative AI and General AI.
Featured Research
Buyer's Guide
Read Now
Research Report
Read Now
eBook
Read Now
Research Report
Read Now
White Paper
Read Now
Research Report
Read Now
Guide
Read Now
Guide
Read Now
Related Stories
Reworked CONNECT 2024 - Pre-Registration is Now Open!
