Box Unveils AI Studio and Apps: Transforming Enterprise Content Management with Customizable AI Agents and No-Code Solutions

Box AI Studio wants to get your business using AI to build efficient and effective workflows

Top cloud storage provider Box has announced a suite of new AI features to help enterprises manage their content better as part of the company's journey from a file-sharing platform to one that offers intelligent content management. The new Box AI Studio and Box Apps are designed to change the way large companies interact with unstructured data, which is estimated to account for around 90% of all enterprise data. To top it all off, the company also announced the introduction of Box Enterprise Advanced, which packages the Box Intelligent Content Management platform into a single offering for the company's biggest customers. "Innovation in LLMs has transformed our ability to more easily structure that data, freeing it from data silos and connecting it with business processes," noted Box CEO Aaron Levie. From January 2025, Box AI Studio will enable enterprises to have more customization over how they apply AI to their content by creating tailored Box AI agents with their preferred AI model from Box's list of providers. With Box AI Studio, admins can create, test and deploy agents to enhance workflows, switch between different models with ease and develop custom prompts for specific tasks. The second of two new product offerings, Box Apps, is now available in beta. Its primary function is a no-code tool for building applications for content-centric processes, like contract management and invoice processing. The company envisions the tool being used by HR, marketing, legal, accounting and sales teams, where administrative work hinders worker productivity. As Box begins to reach more enterprise customers with generative AI functionalities, it also pledged to helping them adhere to regulatory and compliance obligations with Box Archive. Apart from handling long-term content preservation, it also promises to be a useful tool for those recovering content from ransomware attacks, which are on the rise. The announcements culminate in the launch of the Enterprise Advanced subscription, which includes Box AI Studio, Box AI Apps, Box Forms, Box Doc Gen, Box Archive, 500GB file uploads and enhanced developer tools with a higher API allocation. The new plan will also be available in January 2025.

Box continues to expand beyond just data sharing, with agent-driven enterprise AI studio and no-code apps

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More To many enterprises, Box is a well-known file sharing and data collaboration application. Over the course of the last year in particular Box has become a lot more, thanks to its generative AI efforts. Today those efforts are getting a huge boost with technologies that will remake how enterprise users can benefit from their own data. Box AI was announced in May 2023 as the company's initial foray into using AI to help enable more utility from data and documents. Since then Box has added Microsoft 365 Copilot integration and AI-focussed hubs for curated search. Today at the company's BoxWorks event, Box is pushing significantly forward with its new Box AI Studio and Box Apps technologies. Instead of just using AI to query and better understand data, the two new applications will enable organizations to use enterprise AI to build agent-driven workflows as well as applications. The announcement marks a transformative moment for the company, which has evolved from a secure file-sharing platform to an intelligent content management solution provider. "If we think about our path, we got to over a billion in revenue on that core foundation of secure sharing, collaboration and content management," Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, told VentureBeat. "Our path to 2 billion is much more going to be driven by these advanced set of content management and intelligent content management use cases." New Box AI Studio introduces custom agents to drive advanced Enterprise AI workflows Leading the announcement is Box AI Studio, a new platform that enables enterprises to create and deploy custom AI agents. The studio allows organizations to select AI models, implement custom instructions and deploy specialized agents across their enterprise environments. Built on existing partnerships with Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, the AI Studio platform is designed to support various business scenarios. For example, sales enablement teams can create custom agents that understand company-specific language and protocols while accessing consolidated content through Box Hubs. "Imagine if you're the head of sales enablement at a company and you want people to be able to go and ask questions about any sales process," Levie explained. "You might want to create a custom agent that knows how to use your business's language and is effectively instructed to only answer questions in a way that conforms to your sales process or policies." While Box AI Studio enables the creation of agents, Levie emphasized that it's not yet a fully agentic AI capability. The concept of agentic AI typically also involves AI agents being able to act autonomously on behalf of users. "This is the initial, kind of foundational component for eventually doing agentic AI," Levie explained. "We are letting you create agents, and those agents have a basic set of tools within the platform that they can use, and custom instructions and guardrails you can set up." Box Apps will let enterprises build simple no code applications With the new Box Apps technology, the company is set to solve a long standing challenge that enterprises have faced. That is, making data usable in a specific interface. Levie said that in the past enterprises would come to him and say that they have all their content in Box and they wanted to use Box as part of a contract management system for example. The challenge was that Box didn't have the user interface component to enable an enterprise to easily build a contract management solution. That now changes with Box Apps. Box Apps allows users to build instant, intelligent applications directly within the Box platform, without the need for extensive custom development. The Box Apps provide a user interface and dashboard that gives users access to structured data and metadata extracted from the content stored in Box, which has not been possible before without building separate applications. Box Apps eliminates the need for external development or hosting, allowing organizations to build intelligent workflows directly within the Box environment. Box Apps is built on technology that Box acquired in January, called Crooze. It enables rapid development of applications for contract management, digital asset management, invoice processing, and other business-critical workflows. The new Box AI Studio and Box Apps capabilities will be part of a new subscription tier called Enterprise Advanced. "This is the biggest set of new product enhancements that we've ever had as a company," Levie said. "It opens up a much broader set of use cases that we can solve for customers and this gets us into almost every line of business within the enterprise."

Box Apps can transform your files into automated workflows, thanks to AI

The company's new 'no-code' launch lets users mix and match competing AI models. Here's how. 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.

Box deepens AI integrations with customizable, no-code agent builder tools - SiliconANGLE

Box deepens AI integrations with customizable, no-code agent builder tools Box Inc. said today it's infusing even more artificial intelligence into its cloud content management platform with the arrival of Box AI Studio and Box Apps. AI Studio is all about helping companies create and deploy Box AI "agents" that are customized to perform specific business tasks, with users able to choose from a selection of underlying large language models. As for Box Apps, it's a no-code studio for creating intelligent applications for common business processes such as contract management, invoice processing and employee onboarding. Announced at BoxWorks today, the updates are the latest in a string of AI-related enhancements Box has made to its platform, many of which are centered on Box AI, its suite of generative artificial intelligence tools that help to make workers more productive. According to Box co-founder and Chief Executive Aaron Levie, the company is focused on helping organizations to leverage value that's held within their content, which accounts for the vast majority of their unstructured data. "Most of our content is underutilized," Levie said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. "We're not really tapping into the full value of all this enterprise content." Now, he said, thanks to AI, "we're really entering a new world of work. Innovation in LLMs has transformed our ability to more easily structure that data, freeing it from data silos and connecting it with business processes." Box AI already integrates with a selection of powerful LLMs, including models from Microsoft Corp.'s Azure OpenAI Service, Amazon Web Service Inc.'s AWS Bedrock and Google Cloud's Vertex AI, and those integrations are being extended to Box AI Studio, which is expected to launch in January. When it does launch, users will be able to choose their preferred LLM as the basis of new, highly specialized Box AI agents that can be created and deployed by anyone, without any coding skills, to perform various work-related tasks on behalf of human workers. For example, teams will be able to create Box AI Sales agents to assist their sales teams with tasks such as AI-generated contract summaries, so they can answer questions about previous contracts and dig up data-based insights on existing customers. Alternatively, they might want to create a Box AI Marketing agent that's been customized with their brand guidelines and audience preferences to automatically create blog posts and social media content that aligns with the messaging they want to reflect. Other examples include Box AI Service agents for answering employee's questions, or a Box AI Product agent that's able to answer questions about specific company products. The advantage of using Box AI Studio to build these agents is that they can tap into the vast insights held within Box's intelligent document cloud, while mixing and matching LLMs from different providers, so as to identify the best one for each specialized agent. According to Box, this is a unique capability that no other AI agent platform currently supports. Customers also will be able to develop custom prompts to enhance the performance of their agents in specific tasks, and set fine-grained permissions and access controls to govern who can use them. "AI agents will allow people to do more and ultimately become even more valuable and fulfilled in their work," Levie said. "This is going to be a huge breakthrough in solving enterprise problems." As for Box Apps, this is another no-code offering that's more focused on building applications with metadata extraction capabilities, so they can manage "content-centric" business processes to automate them at scale. It's generally available now, and Box provided a number of examples of how it can be used. For instance, HR teams will be able to create "policy-based apps" that intelligently apply metadata to employee policies, internal procedures, simplifying the princess of creating and maintaining commonly used documents. Meanwhile, marketing teams can create "asset apps" for managing media assets like images, videos, graphics and so on, making them easier to ingest, store, search and retrieve. Other ideas include "contract apps" for legal teams that streamline metadata extraction to provide automated alerts on contract expirations, or "transaction apps" for accounting teams that can map existing purchase orders and track transactions from approval to payment. Besides designing and deploying those apps, Box Apps also supports features such as Box Forms and Box Doc Gen, which are launching in beta today. With Box Forms, companies can quickly create and publish web and mobile forms, while Box Doc Gen can be used to spin up customized documents based on the data customers have entered into those forms. International Data Corp. analyst Holly Muscolino praised the updates, saying they expand Box's ability to create business value from unstructured data. "Its ease of use, regional deployments, and strong security capabilities make Box a good option for organizations of all sizes that are looking for a modern SaaS intelligent content cloud services platform," she said. Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. said Box is tackling two problems at once, enabling users to build their own AI applications that leverage the data in Box, while also improving the extensibility of its cloud content management platform with no-code capabilities. "Box customers will be able to get more out of Box, with both updates democratizing access to AI along the right vectors, with extensibility and variety," Mueller said. "It's helping enterprises to reshape the future of work around document automation, both on the transaction side and the AI side." In addition, Box announced a host of new security and compliance capabilities with Box Intelligent Cloud. These include Box Archive, a new storage service for the long-term preservation of content that meets stringent regulatory and compliance requirements, and Content Recovery, which is designed to protect valuable content against ransomware attacks, providing a way to restore inaccessible content more rapidly. To coincide with the launch of these new capabilities, Box said it's introducing a new Enterprise Advanced plan for customers, enabling them to access its entire suite of AI-based content management features in a single package. With the Enterprise Plus plan, which will launch in January at a to-be-determined price -- "nothing that is too crazy for customers," Levie said -- Organizations will be able to use Box AI Studio, Box Apps, Box Forms, Box Doc Gen and Box Archive with support for 500-gigabyte file uploads, together with access to enhanced developer tools and a higher application programming interface allocation.