Cloud content management software provider Box Inc. today announced a new feature launching early next year called Box Hubs, intelligent portals that will make it easier for teams to organize, curate and publish content with internal teams and external partners.

One of the best things about Box Hubs is that it will be deeply integrated with Box AI, a suite of generative artificial intelligence-powered tools that promise to make enterprise workers much more productive. Box Hubs will launch in beta test next year, after Box AI goes live in the Box Enterprise edition of its platform.

Announced at Boxworks, Box’s virtual user conference, Box Hubs is all about content organization and availability. It provides enterprises with all of the tools they need to publish and create content securely, without requiring information technology resources or hours of user training.

Workers can simply create a new Box Hub, without the help of an IT admin, by selecting all of the desired files they want to go in it. The Hub can then be customized with a header, images and icons, descriptive information and more.

Users will be able to add new content from Box to a Box Hub at any time, organizing it into easy-to-read content and publishing it without moving the underlying file from its current folder. Whenever content is moved into a Hub, it will retain whatever permissions have been set up, so only the desired audience can access it. The Hubs themselves will be accessible from a new Hubs gallery, which eliminates the need for workers to search through dozens of different folders to find what they’re looking for.

Box says Box Hubs will be ideal for human resources teams to publish content such as the company handbook, 401(k) plans and so on. Sales enablement teams might want to create Hubs containing their corporate pitch, buyer personas and discovery questions, while brand teams can use Hubs to create ready-made templates, images and logos. Marketing teams can also create Hubs for specific teams, campaigns and so on. And product teams can use Hubs to provide easy access to each product’s roadmap, organization charts and quarterly planning processes, for example.

International Data Corp. analyst Wayne Kurtzman said the sheer amount of unstructured data enterprises are generating has led to content being sprawled across silos and applications. He believes Box Hubs will be a welcome new capability for Box users. “In addition to mitigating security and compliance risks, new ways of leveraging content drive better ways of finding needed content, create new insights, and become a strategic advantage,” Kurtzman said.

According to Box Chief Executive Aaron Levie, Box Hubs will make it much easier for workers to organize and make sense of the vast amounts of content within their organization. “Getting content into the hands of the right people at the right time is a big challenge,” he told SiliconANGLE in an interview. “It’s never been a harder problem than today to keep people on the same page.”

The integration with Box AI means Box users will be able to find what they’re looking for by asking a generative AI assistant to find it, or to summarize the information within each Hub, Box said. For example, Levie said, a sales portal for a jet engine maker can be created with, say, 1,000 documents and then users can ask what’s the price of the company’s jet engine in Japan. “Content is where the greatest upside is for generative AI,” Levie said.

Customers will also be able to use Box AI’s content creation capabilities to create new documents within a Hub.

The Box AI capabilities were announced in May, and they will launch next month in beta test mode for Enterprise plan subscribers only, Box said. The first two capabilities will enable users to create content within Box Notes and ask questions about specific documents when they’re being previewed in Box.

Access will be somewhat limited at first, though, with individual users restricted to just 20 queries per month, and 2,000 additional queries available at the company level. Eventually, Box plans to offer users the chance to purchase additional queries.

Box Hubs will launch in beta early next year, when it will be made available to all users with Enterprise subscription plans and above. It will also be available to all Box AI users at the same time.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Images: Box