File sharing company Box Inc. is getting its hands on some top artificial intelligence talent after signing up the team behind Butter AI Corp., which makes AI-based enterprise file search software.

The deal, which is essentially an “acqui-hire” since Box is not buying the entire company, means that Butter.ai’s original application will also shut down, officials said in a blog post.

Box said the acquisition will allow it to add more intelligent search features to its own platform. The idea is to make file search more contextualized, personalized and predictive, the company added. Officials said they need to improve Box’s file search capabilities because its users are contending with an ever-increasing amount of content.

Alan Lepofsky, principal analyst and vice president at Constellation Research Inc., agreed that the abundance of information workers are dealing with is no joke, but said that it’s not only the quantity of that data but also the plethora of locations where it’s stored that’s causing problems.

“It’s not just the files, but also the conversations and the people related to those files,” Lepofsky said. “Vendors are trying to use AI to bring context to that information, making it more contextual to the moment or action taking place. This acquisition by Box will help them compete against features like Quick Access in Google Drive.”

The additional AI expertise Box has acquired should also benefit its strategy around Box Skills, which is a machine learning framework that’s designed to make video, audio, image and other files more useful on its content management service. Announced in October, Box Skills provides the ability to perform tasks on content such as computer vision for image analysis, video indexing and sentiment analysis from audio using machine learning technologies from IBM Corp.’s Watson, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud and Google LLC’s cloud.

Box Chief Executive Officer Aaron Levie (pictured) spoke about his vision for AI in an April interview with SiliconANGLE, saying he believes the technology could also be used in Box’s products to automate underlying business workflows and help workers to quickly find the information they need.

“All of that work, that is really just us interacting with computers to try to find information and do something with it,” Levie said. “We think machine learning is the only real way to do that at scale.”

Image: JD Lasica/Flickr