Cloud content management provider Box Inc. is integrating OpenAI LP’s most advanced generative artificial intelligence models into Box Content Cloud, making it easier for enterprise workers to extract insights from the data they work with.

Announced at Box’s Content Cloud Summit today, Box AI is billed as a suite of AI capabilities that will primarily focus on two things: helping users to ask questions about documents and creating new content in Box. The company explained that it’s uniquely placed to help enterprises tap the potential of generative AI, because Box AI’s capabilities are governed by the same built-in permissions that keep their content secure on the platform.

Generative AI has become all the rage ever since OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT took the internet by storm thanks to its ability to answer questions and generate content in a humanlike way. Since then, technology providers have been racing to integrate its capabilities into various enterprise tools, and Box may well have hit upon one of the most promising use cases yet.

“These large language models are truly a new era of AI,” Box Chief Executive Aaron Levie said in an interview with SiliconANGLE. “They’re general-purpose models that are much more broadly applicable. We can turn all of this enterprise content into business value.”

The most obvious application of generative AI in Box is to help users find the detailed information they need from among hundreds of different documents. With Box AI, users will be able to pull up any document and ask questions in natural language to find exactly what they’re looking for in an instant.

So sales teams could use Box AI to provide answers to their questions about a complex sales contract, while analysts could ask it to summarize a lengthy financial report quickly. Legal teams might ask Box AI to identify any clauses, terms and obligations in a contract to speed up review cycles, and customer service teams could quickly surface insights from hundreds of responses to a customer survey.

Box AI will also help workers create content. Users will be able to open up Box Notes and ask Box AI to draft all manner of emails, newsletters, blog posts and memos based on their existing content.

For instance, a marketer could use Box AI to overcome writer’s block when creating copy for a new advertising campaign, or a communications team member could quickly draft a social media post to make an announcement in their organization’s standard voice, while obeying character limits. Meanwhile, product teams will be supported by an on-demand sounding board within Box AI to generate ideas and designs faster.

Levie said generative AI’s potential to increase productivity dramatically is likely to spark a new arms race among software providers. “The cloud wars are pretty close to this but it’s more like the OS wars of the 1980s,” he said. “[Foundational models] are more like operating systems for information, and they’re going to be the core CPUs of software in future. I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited as this about any technology.”

Analyst Holly Muscolino of International Data Corp. agreed, saying that those companies who are slow to adopt AI will likely be left behind by their competitors. ”AI will augment human abilities, automate repetitive tasks, provide personalized recommendations, and make data-driven decisions with speed and accuracy,” she said. “Box’s Content Cloud is well-positioned to harness the power of AI, and it will play a key role in helping businesses reach this next stage in the future of work.”

When pressed on the risks associated with AI, Levie stressed that Box’s strict permissions will govern what data Box AI can and cannot see, ensuring that customers will remain in full control of their data. When users ask Box AI a question, its answers will be restricted to the data in documents that person has permission to access.

Box has also taken careful steps to avoid “hallucinations,” which is when AI fabricates a response when it cannot find a factual answer. According to Levie, Box avoids this by training its models to simply admit it doesn’t know. “We’ve found that we can prevent hallucination by telling it to work off the context we’re giving it, and say it doesn’t know if the information isn’t there,” Levie explained.

Andy Thurai, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc., said the new AI capabillities promise to make the experience of using Box much better. “The new option to create emails, newsletters, presentations and blogs from within Box Notes means people can avoid the clunky interface issues that have plagued Box for some years,” he said. “This move can potentially bring Box to the fore as a major player in the collaborative space, as opposed to just the document storage space, as it is today.

One of the main questions for enterprises is if Box is using public APIs and sending data back to OpenAI and Azure, or if it’s using OpenAI’s model on a private instance in order train Box AI on customer’s data, the analyst said.

“If Box has opted for the latter, then Box AI has the potential to become a true differentiator, but if it’s the former, it could be setting itself up for disaster,” Thurai said. “Box needs to guarantee the continued, enterprise-grade security, privacy, governance and compliance it’s known for. If it can do this, then Box AI is a good move.”

Access to Box AI’s capabilities will initially be limited to select customers who apply to join Box’s upcoming Design Partner Program. The company doesn’t yet have a timeline for general availability, but Levie said some capabilities will be made available for free within the core Content Cloud offering, with others potentially being premium offerings.

Box AI remains a work in progress and Levie said the company has plans to embed its capabilities far more deeply into the Box Content Cloud. Ideas include automating workflows and automatically classifying certain files to enhance security.

“The big idea is when you can do this across a broad set of data,” Levie said. “For example, you could ask a question across the entire HR data set.”

With reporting from Robert Hof

Images: Box