Manual document searches can waste hours of valuable time. Our Box Trust team cut response times by implementing AI-powered solutions across three critical business functions. Here’s how we transformed our operations — and how you can too.
Read on to see how adopting AI has enabled us to scale information faster, run comparative analyses across lengthy documents, and utilize metadata to create a real-time, auto-populated source of truth.
Fast-tracking information
Most companies have a ‘one-stop shop’ for employees to find company policies, but reality usually falls short of good intentions. Employees have to manually locate the right PDF, followed by the specific text they’re looking for. We’ve all been there: clicking into the document, doing a “Control F” search, and hoping that this is the right one.
Using Box Hubs, our Policies & Standards team created a Policy Hub that enables employees to use Box AI to ask policy-related questions. Instead of taking 30 minutes to an hour, and perhaps still not finding the right answer, Box AI can forage through the policy documents and deliver the answer in seconds. Also, and this is key, Box AI provides a link to the policy (or policies) from where the information originated, so employees can follow up if they’d like.
As another example of using AI to scale internal information, the Customer Trust team created a Slack channel where more than 600 Boxers can ask one-off, trust-related questions. To dramatically accelerate this process, the team built a Trust Hub by adding folders with trust-related documentation — including controlled documents like our SOC 2 and customer-facing penetration test reports. After rigorous testing (this is a must!), they invited account teams to use the Trust Hub instead of the Slack channel for a more immediate and still-accurate response.
“This has saved our team significant time by minimizing the need to respond to standard, repetitive questions,” said Nina Russo, Manager for Customer Trust. “And our account teams love it.”
In both examples, the benefit of saving time compounds over time. Employees get their policy-related answer and get back to work, whereas previously it took longer and they may still have needed to ask leadership. For account teams, they save follow-up time while creating a better customer experience — without needing to pull the Customer Trust team away from other work. Win, win, win.
Run comparative analysis
Nearly every company has a Third Party Risk Management (TRPM) team. This behind-the-scenes work, which involves reviewing a lot of documentation and following up with business owners and vendors, can be tedious. Box’s TPRM team built an AI Agentic workflow, effectively a long prompt calling out what to look for and specifying how to organize the report, to accelerate the initial documentation review, identify risks, and write the first draft of the report.
While it doesn’t solve for collecting the necessary documentation yet, using the TRPM AI Agent dramatically reduces the time it takes for initial reviews. In just minutes, the team can run the agent and get that initial report and avoid missing details.
“We’re saving time, but it’s more than that,” said Barbara Aryee, Third Party Risk Senior Analyst. “Using the AI Agent is allowing us to do deeper reviews and then spend more time on areas that get flagged for additional investigation.”
It’s also freeing up time and energy for the team to focus more on strategic initiatives to continually uplift the program.
In collaboration with the Compliance team, TRPM is also using Box AI to identify updates or changes to a cloud service provider’s (CSP’s) SOC 2 compared with last year’s. Complementary User Entity Controls (aka CUECs) are controls handled by the CSP, and a key component of certification audits. Imagine the fun. We have this year's and last year’s SOC 2 report for a critical vendor side by side, and we need to know what has changed from one year to the next. Using Box AI, the team was able to speed up the comparison and, again, get the initial report in minutes.
Use metadata for real-time source of truth
Many of us have experienced manually trying to keep a spreadsheet up to date, only to later find out there were multiple versions floating around. The Policies & Standards team used Box Metadata and Apps to transition from tracking policy updates in Excel to using a real-time dashboard populated by metadata from the policies. This dashboard enables the team to search by quarter, approver, organization, or other areas, and is automatically updated when the newly approved policy is uploaded. In other words, say goodbye to version-control hell with 100 offline versions of the truth.
Ing Mulkarat, Senior Manager for Policies & Standards, said that using Box Metadata and Apps saves the team time. “It also increases our accuracy and reduces missed deadlines,” she added.
Seeing Policies & Standards demonstrate Box Metadata and Apps’ business benefits and ease of use, Customer Trust built out something similar for their inventory of customer-facing assurance documents, including knowledge papers, industry templates, and certifications. The result is the team has a better handle on regularly reviewing and updating knowledge papers, which has historically been a challenge.
Reinventing what we do
These are real-world examples of quantifiable business benefits people in Trust are realizing by using Box AI and other solutions. Stepping back, the teams now take these time savings for granted and are reinvesting the dividends in growing the business, and there’s an overall excitement that’s hard to quantify but easy to see. People relish the opportunity to play a key role in reinventing what they do. And they’re having fun.
Looking ahead, this is only the beginning. People on different teams, even in different groups, are sharing ideas and techniques, and even exploring the possibility of merging processes. The focus is on what can the technology enable. How do we make real what before we could only imagine?
If you’re interested in how these use cases may work in your environment, check out BoxWorks on September 11 and 12 to hear about our existing and coming product offerings, including Box AI, Apps, Metadata, and Automate. And be sure to see Tom Cowles, Chief Compliance Officer, and Leah Perry, Chief Privacy Officer, talk about Box’s approach to AI Governance.
