Hoping to help companies make sense of their growing crush of data, Box Inc. today announced a deal with Google Inc. to tap into the search giant’s artificial intelligence prowess.

The file sharing and cloud content management company said it will use Google’s Cloud Vision technology, which uses machine learning to understand images, to surface useful information out of files, especially images such as forms, receipts, passports and the like. Those images usually have had to be tagged or labeled manually, taking a lot of time and introducing potential mistakes.

“We can bring intelligence to these images,” Rand Wacker, vice president of product marketing at Box, said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. “We’re taking what they find in those images and making it super-easy to use the information in them.”

More specifically, Box will tap into the application programming interface for Cloud Vision, which is used in Google Photos and image search, to extract more information out of images, the second-fastest type of business content in Box. The integration will help businesses detect objects and even concepts in images, recognize and capture text through optical character recognition, automatically add labels with keywords and build so-called metadata on image catalogs to allow the information to be used in various business processes and applications.

For example, photos of jeans and denim could be automatically recognized and labeled to make the creation of a searchable catalog faster and easier. Or a company that needs to store an employee’s driver’s license can do so by taking a picture of it with a phone camera, sending it to a secure folder, and processing it with the Cloud Vision API to pull out the text on it. Insurance claims from the field also can be processed automatically.

“The real value is in augmenting the way people get work done,” said Alan Lepofsky, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research. “Most enterprises have vast repositories of images, videos and Office documents that they are not currently getting maximum value out of. Automating workflows such as tagging, filtering and searching can dramatically improve the way people discover and share content.”

Fei-Fei Li, chief scientist for Google Cloud AI and a professor of computer science at Stanford University, added in a statement that the integration will demonstrate the potential of AI in the enterprise. “Ultimately it will democratize AI for more people and businesses,” she said. And for Google, it’s another potential boost for its cloud, which is in hot pursuit of Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Azure.

For Box, Wacker said, the benefits are pretty apparent as the company continues to try to move further beyond basic file storage, a crowded and not very profitable market. “Anytime we can add more capabilities to customers’ content, that enables them to move more core processes onto Box,” he said.

Several Box customers such as Creative Artists Agency and the University of California at Santa Barbara have been testing the integration, which is now in private beta test. Pricing will be announced later this year when the capability is generally available.

Google isn’t Box’s only partner in this realm. In late June, Box signed a broad partnership with Microsoft Corp. that includes “exploring” integrating Microsoft’s Azure cloud Cognitive Services with Box. The companies said possibilities include advanced content processing technologies such as video indexing, so media and entertainment companies might use it to discover related content or make recommendations for their Box content.

Image: Box