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.”

Box Apps automates business processes

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 in beta test mode 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.”

Security and compliance enhanced

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.

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