Content management platform Box wants to make sense of all your PDFs, contracts, and images so your business can work more seamlessly — using, of course, artificial intelligence (AI).
On Tuesday, the company announced two new enterprise AI products: Box Apps and Box AI Studio. The former helps businesses build no-code apps for processes like onboarding, invoicing, and more, while the latter lets them create customized AI agents, an increasingly popular fixture of enterprise AI.
Box Apps
Available in beta now, Box Apps is intended to streamline "content-centric business processes" across all kinds of teams within an organization. Content can include anything file-based, from contracts to marketing campaigns. The feature is designed to extract valuable metadata from that previously unstructured content to help intelligently automate workflows.
Also: I changed 5 ChatGPT settings and instantly became more productive – here's how
"90 percent of the data in an enterprise is unstructured — and the vast majority of that data is content," CEO Aaron Levie said in the release. In an interview with ZDNET, Levie explained that Box's goal with Apps is to tap into that unstructured data to help teams achieve "all the things people don't solve today."
Box envisions nearly every department using Apps: HR can build policy-specific apps, legal departments can use it for efficient contract review, and marketing teams can create customized asset management systems for graphics and video. Levie emphasized that Apps will be more affordable than competitors in order to be accessible to smaller-scale businesses but he did not specify a cost.
To augment that automation framework, the company also released Forms and Doc Gen, now available in beta. With Box Forms, users can generate and publish forms to streamline data collection, and Doc Gen generates custom documents using that data and data from third-party apps and other sources.
Box AI Studio
Several enterprise software companies now offer an AI agent builder, from Salesforce to Asana. But Box says that a "mix-and-match" approach to large language models (LLMs) is what sets its offering apart.
Rather than using a single language to build every agent across the board, Box AI Studio lets users build with different models for different use cases. "With AI Studio, admins can select their preferred AI model from Box's list of trusted providers to create tailored Box AI agents with custom prompts and parameters to match their specific industry needs and workflows—no coding required," the release states. As Box explained to ZDNET, users could pick "Claude for HR-related prompts" and GPT 4.0 for more technical situations, making the most of each model's strengths.
Also: Want a programming job in 2024? Learning any language helps, but only one is essential
Box AI Studio, which won't roll out until January, will integrate several competing large language models (LLMs), including models from Microsoft Azure, AWS, Claude, and Google's Vertex AI. The company plans to add more in the future, and you can see the full list of currently available models here.
Increased Security
Box also announced two new security measures, slated to roll out in beta in January: Box Archive, which improves archival content management for better compliance, and Content Recovery, which helps businesses recover their content after a ransomware attack in "hours instead of days."
"Our core platform itself is focused on data compliance and security," Levie explained to ZDNET, noting that these features build AI governance into a strong security foundation.
Also: Passkeys are more popular than ever. This research explains why
After cyber attacks, these security updates are intended to let businesses get their files back quickly, precisely, and at scale "in a matter of clicks," complete with a dashboard that shows the impact of the attack and which files were compromised.
The company also launched a new plan tier called Enterprise Advanced, which it says "combines the full power of the Box Intelligent Content Management platform into a single offering." It includes everything users already access in the Enterprise Plus plan and the latest releases: Apps, AI Studio, Forms, Doc Gen, Archive, and more. The new plan will be available in January.