Box Inc. is beefing up its already powerful artificial intelligence capabilities in an effort to automate even more enterprise work with AI agents.

The cloud content management platform announced a host of new “agentic” AI features at its annual user conference BoxWorks 2025 today, including an AI agent-powered data extraction tool called Box Extract and a new workflow automation system called Box Automate. There’s no official timeline, but the new tools will be made available to Enterprise Advanced customers in the coming months, alongside several enhancements to the company’s no-code application builder Box Apps, and an all-new Box Shield Pro offering for securing sensitive data in Box.

Box debuted its first AI agents in February, introducing a series of robotic workers powered by generative AI that can complete tasks such as querying documents and extracting data from files with minimal supervision. With today’s offerings, it’s building on those initial agentic capabilities to enable more comprehensive AI automation.

Automated data insights

For instance, Box Extract is all about unleashing AI agents to dig up critical insights that human workers might miss by carefully scanning everything from contracts and invoices to spreadsheets and images. As Box explains, this kind of data is unstructured, which makes it especially difficult to access. Until the rise of AI agents, the only way to unearth insights from these kinds of documents was to sift through them manually, but of course, that’s completely impractical for an enterprise that has amassed thousands of them.

With AI agents, it’s no longer a problem, because enterprises are getting what is essentially a team of robotic workers on steroids. As the name suggests, Box Extract is all about data extraction, relying on the “reasoning” skills of its enhanced extract agents to not only understand the documents they’re looking through, but to pick out the most vital bits of information within them.

These agents, Box says, have particularly good context understanding skills, which make them uniquely able to interpret documents with tables, charts, handwriting, barcodes and other complicated inputs. They can understand the semantic relationships between different fields to dig up “nested and interrelated data points” and then filter this information to different applications and business processes using the Box Extract application programming interface.

As has long been the case with Box’s AI offerings, customers can choose virtually any large language model they desire to power these capabilities. Its catalog of LLMs include the latest and most powerful models from OpenAI, Google LLC, Anthropic PBC, Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon Web Services Inc., xAI Corp. and IBM Corp.

Splitting work between humans and AI agents

Box Automate, meanwhile, is a new agentic workflow automation tool that aims to better orchestrate work across AI agents and human workers. The idea is that companies can hand off as much work as possible to AI agents, such as manual data entry tasks and accounting processes, so that humans can focus on the more complex and nuanced tasks that AI can’t yet be relied on to do effectively.

The company said Box Automate makes it simple for companies to design and manage automated AI workflows using a streamlined no-code or low-code interface. As part of this process, users can create and customize foundational AI agents for each specific task. So, for instance, the Box Extract agent can be fine-tuned on the specific documents a healthcare organization has to deal with each day, while a research agent can be trained to create reports based on a specific format. As users are creating each workflow, they can assign each of the different tasks involved to the most suitable entity, be it an AI agent, a human or a specific system, based on business logic and real-time context.

Box co-founder and Chief Executive Aaron Levie said Box Automate can be used to create an incredibly wide variety of workflows that span client onboarding, sales automation, invoice processing, field operations and more. With it, users can specify exactly which tasks in those processes should be automated and which should be performed by humans.

“As AI agents rapidly integrate into every vertical and domain, we’re witnessing a fundamental shift in how work gets done,” Levie explained. “This new generation of intelligent agents… [is] enabling organizations to automate previously impossible tasks and unlock massive new value.”

Better Box Apps

The Box Apps platform has proved to be one of Box’s most popular AI tools, making it relatively easy for workers to create intelligent applications that can automate or streamline tasks such as contract management, digital asset libraries, employee onboarding experiences and more. Users will now be able to make even more capable AI-generated apps that can integrate with AI agents. For instance, Box talks about its new agent-assisted analysis capabilities that can help applications to identify new trends and anomalies and recommend actions to users based on what it finds.

Other new features include enhanced natural language search tools to help users quickly explore the content stored within their AI applications, and new “dynamic data visualizations” including charts and graphs that can evolve in real time as more data is fed into them. Box has also worked hard on the integration side, so customers can now embed their Box Apps within third-party software platforms such as Salesforce and Workday.

Protecting sensitive content

Finally, Box said it’s expanding its AI-native content protection tool Box Shield, with a new “Pro” version that uses AI agents to enhance risk classification, accelerate threat response and proactively strengthen security.

When Box launched the original Box Shield more than five years ago, the company didn’t mention AI once. With this new update, virtually all of its main capabilities can now be automated with AI agents, so security is not only stronger but also simpler to implement.

Box Shield Pro’s AI security agents have been trained specifically to safeguard every sensitive document, and they can do this without human input. Every time a new file is uploaded to Box, an AI classification agent will quickly check it and then decide if it’s sensitive or not, based on the file’s context, the type of data within and the organization’s existing security policies.

If it’s deemed to be sensitive, it will automatically be secured and governed with the appropriate access controls. As an example, Box said a healthcare organization can use its security classification agents to automatically detect documents that contain a patient’s personal information and health records and restrict access to it.

Meanwhile, the AI threat analysis agent works around the clock, under the hood, continuously checking which documents are being accessed, when and by whom. Should it discover any unauthorized access, it will create an alert together with a concise, easily understandable summary that explains the nature of the alert, so security teams can respond faster.

There’s also a third type of agent that’s focused on ransomware activity detection, which oversees Box Drive and the rest of the Box content management platform. Its primary job is to detect mass encryption of content, which is a sure sign of ransomware, and then take rapid action to remediate such attacks.

Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Melody Brue said Box Shield Pro can be useful, because the rapid adoption of AI agents creates new risks for organizations. “Traditional security protocols were not designed to manage these agents at a machine’s processing speed,” she said. “Box Shield Pro’s approach of integrating security controls directly into AI agent operations provides a method for maintaining cybersecurity when human oversight isn’t practical.”

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