Bringing AI to your business with Box Skills

Box Skills leverages the world’s best AI to enhance your content in Box. Whether it’s detecting objects in images, transcribing speech to text in audio files, extracting fields off of a form, or detecting faces in videos, there are hundreds of AI technologies that can enhance your data in Box and help you unlock value and insight from your business content.

Today, we’re excited to announce the GA release of the Box Skills Kit and introduce services and partners that can help you bring AI-driven solutions to market and drive your business forward.

In this post, you’ll find details on:

• The GA of the Box Skills Kit, a developer toolkit for building custom Box Skills
• Our partnership with IBM Watson to power intelligent cloud content management solutions
• A new service offering in Box Consulting to bring AI into your content management strategy
• Services partners who can help build custom solutions with Box Skills

Box Skills Kit GA release

Starting today, developers can build Box Skills and apply AI to the way their business works with the Box Skills Kit. Box Skills are applications that process files uploaded to Box by applying third-party AI algorithms, such as those available from IBM Watson, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, or dozens of other AI providers. Box Skills write the outputs of the AI processing to files in Box as metadata, which is used to enhance several Box capabilities including file preview, search, automation, and more. The Box Skills Kit is a set of APIs, SDKs, guides and sample code to help developers build Box Skills, integrating any applicable AI service with Box. Developers can also explore dozens of example Box Skills created by members of the Box Developer community on Github.

"There are many powerful AI technologies available today,” says Laurent Boyadjian, Domain Manager – Cloud Technologies at Rémy Cointreau. “With the Box Skills Kit, we can easily bring these technologies into our business and start seeing the benefits of AI immediately. This allows us to use Box in all new ways and unlock value from our business content."

Developers can start building Box Skills by visiting the Box Developer Portal. You can learn more about the Box Skills Kit GA in our announcement blog post here.

Custom Skills with IBM Watson

Custom Skills with IBM Watson is a service offering to build custom Box Skills that utilize AI technologies from IBM Watson AI technologies to enhance content in Box and drive digital business initiatives. These highly-customizable solutions, built by the IBM Watson team using the Box Skills Kit, enable businesses to apply IBM’s enterprise-strength Watson AI to enterprise content managed in Box. Since announcing the offering, IBM has worked with dozens of companies to discuss AI-driven solutions for cloud content management and designed and developed proof-of-concept Box Skills for leading enterprise businesses such as H&R Block Canada. The Canadian tax preparation company is attaining document insights using Box and Watson for their 'Do it yourself' returns program.

“With unstructured data growing at an exponential rate, businesses have a tremendous source of valuable insight.  However, this data is untapped largely due to the shortcomings of traditional methods of analysis,” said Beth Smith, General Manager, IBM Watson AI. “Custom Skills with Watson uses AI to help organizations unlock these insights and ultimately reimagine how work is done.”

IBM Watson offers several solutions that can be customized to fit a customer's particular needs. IBM's Box Skills solutions include:

• Custom document insights with Watson Natural Language Understanding
• Custom image insights with Watson Visual Recognition
• Custom audio analysis with Watson Speech-to-Text

With the GA release of the Box Skills Kit, IBM can accelerate the development of solutions with Watson AI. For more information or to speak with an IBM Watson representative about custom Box Skills using Watson AI, please visit www.ibm.com/watson/box.

New Box Consulting services for AI strategy

While many businesses are eager to start using AI, it can be difficult to know where to start. That's why today, we're excited to announce new services from Box Consulting to help enterprise customers develop an AI strategy and identify use cases for AI as part of their content management strategy. The new offering, available now as part of an engagement from Box Consulting, includes a range of services from use case ideation workshops to proof-of-concept development and solution architecture reviews. Box Consulting has already completed several AI engagements, assisting customers in ideating and implementing AI solutions in their business.

Customers interested in engaging with Box Consulting to identify ways to apply AI in their business can reach out to their Box Sales Representative to learn more.

Box Skills Verified Partners to help accelerate AI solutions development

Box Skills makes it easier than ever before for businesses to apply the world's best AI technologies to their content in Box. Many IT organizations, however, may not have the required resources to build custom solutions. Over the past several months, Box engaged several services partners that range in size and areas of expertise to help accelerate the development of custom Box Skills solutions for enterprise customers. We are excited to announce the first set of Box Skills Verified Partners, a set of service providers trained in building Box Skills that customers can work with to bring AI solutions with Box to market quickly. Initial Box Skills Verified Partners include IBM, Codelitt, Reva Solutions, and Crayon. Partners in this program are equipped to build a variety of custom AI solutions for Box, including:

• Intelligent digital asset management using customized computer vision models
• Contract analysis solutions using OCR and natural language processing algorithms
• Client onboarding solutions with automatic data extraction for licenses and passports

For more information about Box Skills Verified Partners, please reach out to your Box Sales Representative with details about your use case.

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We're incredibly excited about all the updates about Box Skills. For more information, please visit box.com/skills.