Cloud document and content management provider Box has introduced three new AI capabilities to its platform: Box Automate, Box Extract, and Box Shield.
According to the company, these new additions will help organizations get more value from their data while also keeping it more secure.
Speaking to ITPro ahead of the official launch at BoxWorks 2025, the company’s CTO Ben Kus said Box Extract was a way to solve the perennial issue of making use of unstructured data.
“Most of your data in an organization is actually in the form of this unstructured data – 90% plus of most organizations – it's data in an unstructured form, but it contains an awful lot of very useful structured data as well,” said Kus.
He added that, in order to make use of this information, a human would have to sift through it all manually. The advent of generative AI, however, has changed that.
“Generative AI was born on unstructured data, so it can understand these things, and this is where you suddenly have the ability to not only use and analyze unstructured data in its raw form, but also the next generation of capabilities to extract structured data,” Kus said.
“We've been looking at this for a long time and while you used to be able to get labels out of image or train a model to … do handwriting recognition and OCR.
But it was very limited on what it could work on, because you had to very specifically train these very specific models,” he continued. “Now, with something like Box Extract, we can pull almost any structured information out of almost any file type … almost like a human would do.”
While Box Extract allows businesses to collect relevant information from documents of almost all types, Box Automate helps streamline business processes using an AI agent.
Kus gave a hypothetical example of a company that required 15 checks before a product release was published.
“You might need to have specialists double check it first and that can take a lot of time,” said Kus.
“There are delays where people don't have time to review it and so on. Now, with an AI agent you can actually have it look through all of the checks … and then be able to route the process to say ‘ah, this looks a little bit wrong. I'm gonna notify the person to change something’. Say a contract review has a risky clause, the AI can route it to a lawyer to spend more time on this topic.”
By cutting out the need to have specialists internal or external involved in the process unnecessarily, processes are more efficient, customers have a better experience, and “everything progresses more smoothly,” claimed Kus.
Box Shield Pro
Box Shield Pro is the third AI service launched at Boxworks which the company said will bring “the next-generation of content protection” to information stored in the Box cloud.
Shield Pro, which integrates into Box’s existing Shield offering, is an AI agent that automatically labels documents according to their sensitivity and sets permissions accordingly.
“It's almost like there’s an IT security professional who assists that person in labeling the documents, who can say ‘I think it should actually be labelled differently’ – but the AI can help by saying it [at the outset],” explains Kus.
“None of these policies are like ‘the AI will decide, and then anything can never change it’. It becomes something that is more there to help you with some of these laborious processes of determining these classification levels up front.”
Box Extract and Box Automate will be available to customers on Enterprise Advanced plans “in the coming months”, the company said, while Box Shield Pro will be available as an add-on SKU for current Box Shield, Enterprise Plus, and Enterprise Advanced customers.
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