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

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.”