Content + AI: Transforming intelligent workflows and user experiences

Think back to a world of content without AI. It wasn’t that long ago that content was hard to find and even harder to use. Content platforms served the essential purpose of securely storing and organizing information, and providing a foundation for collaboration. However, teams spent hours manually sifting through documents, extracting information and deriving insights to help make critical business decisions. Without AI, content is passive - something that is stored, managed and manually mined.

What if content worked for you? At Box, we’re redefining content management for the AI era. Unlike other platforms that are bolting on features to check the AI box, we are deeply integrating AI all through our platform - from the core metadata layer to intelligent user experiences, from AI-powered workflows to APIs.

We launched Box AI in 2023 to unlock the value of content and make every person in the organization smarter and more productive. Last month, we launched Box AI Studio, helping organizations easily create and use AI agents tailored to their business, to automate tasks and boost productivity - improving customer support, accelerating employee onboarding and more. And today, we continue the momentum with several new innovations and exciting announcements:

• New AI agents to power intelligent workflows - New Box AI extract agents to accelerate decision-making and automate workflows; and the ability to create custom agents via the Box AI Studio API to help teams surface insights quickly and build tailored AI-driven processes. 
• Smarter, more intuitive AI experiences - with multi-doc querying and enhanced AI features that help users rapidly get the answers they need with the precision they want 
• Make Box AI more accessible - Expanding AI availability to customers on Business, Business Plus, and Enterprise plans; and evolving our pricing framework with the introduction of Box AI Units, making it easier to manage and scale AI usage.

Introducing new agents to power intelligent workflows

Think of a world where critical information is instantly available, eliminating time-consuming searches and manual data entry. This is the power we're unlocking with Box AI's new extract agents. These agents automatically pull key details from your documents and images, without requiring employees to manually tag everything, or rely on traditional technologies that are hard to set up and maintain, and don't work well for unstructured data. 

Recognizing the transformation that AI agents bring, IDC* estimates that, “50% of organizations will use enterprise agents configured for specific business functions, instead of focusing on individual copilot technologies to achieve faster business value from AI.”

The Box AI extract agents are natively built into Box experiences - accessible through the ‘Autofill’ feature in Box Preview and in Box Apps, and available to customers on the Enterprise Advanced plan. With a click of a button, users can instantly extract critical information from long, dense documents, as well as images, validate the accuracy of the info, and save it into metadata - readily available right alongside the content.

We’re also launching the ability to leverage Box AI extract agents via API. This API allows developers and AI technologists to define fields and custom instructions for AI to extract exactly what the business needs. By automating this traditionally manual and error-prone process and enabling metadata extraction at scale, we are making the use of metadata a practical reality for all your content, not just your most critical files. Box AI extract agents via API are available to customers on Enterprise Plus and above.

Further, we are extending Box AI Studio with the addition of API support. Box AI Studio APIs allow developers and AI experts to configure and customize agents with specific instructions — like how to respond to a particular question in a way that reflects the business’s context, or define which fields to extract from documents.

"Box AI’s extraction agents have transformed how Fundwell derives insights from our content. For over a year, we’ve been testing Box AI’s extract API in our workflows, averaging over 20,000 calls per month. What used to take hours—pulling key financial data from statements, tax forms, and investment documents (many of which are quite large, upwards of 100+ pages and sometimes scanned)—now happens in mere minutes with an extremely high level of accuracy and reliability. Box is constantly improving the quality of results, making our processes both more efficient and cost-effective. Our teams can focus on providing strategic advice rather than manual data entry. With Box AI continuing to evolve, it remains our content intelligence tool of choice for our mission-critical processes." – Adam Anzouni, CTO at Fundwell.

Here are some additional examples of how organizations can leverage the Box AI extract agent and AI Studio APIs

• Property management firms can pull out key information (such as expiration date, contract amount etc.) from customer agreements with the Box AI extract agent to drive key renewal decisions and contract workflows
• Universities can create a “grant assistant” agent that analyzes submitted grants at scale, summarizes them for reviewers, and accelerates grant processing.
• Procurement teams can use vendor contract metadata to onboard, manage, and automate vendor payment approvals ensuring business continuity, and making reporting and cost management much easier

"At Miller Tanner, manual data entry was consuming hundreds of hours each year, slowing down the critical work we do for our customers. With Box’s Extract API, we’ve seamlessly embedded AI into our workflows, enabling us to process data from diverse sources with ease. Box AI intelligently extracts key details—even from content spanning multiple airlines and languages—saving our teams invaluable time and dramatically improving efficiency. We’re excited to continue expanding our use of Box AI to drive even greater productivity." - Daniel Conroy, Chief Digital Officer, Miller Tanner & Associates.

Delivering enhanced AI experiences for every Box user

We’re excited to announce image querying, enabling users to ask questions of images stored on Box - from photos and graphics, to blueprints and document scans.

This unlocks massive productivity gains with instant insights to be gleaned from the millions of images stored in Box. For example, property rental companies can use image querying on pictures to instantly assess and understand the turn-in condition of their properties. Insurance companies can ask Box AI to assess automobile damages from accidents.

We are also thrilled to announce Box AI’s multi-doc querying capability, enabling users to ask questions of a set of files they select, and get accurate answers instantly based on that context. This capability is similar to the Box AI for Hubs feature of asking questions of a Hub, and applies to a set user-selected files within a folder. This eliminates the need for extensive manual searches and helps users find information faster, view citations for every response, and trace findings back to their original sources for accuracy and reliability. 

This functionality is a game-changer for users who need to quickly make decisions based on information spread across multiple files. For example:

• Financial firms can synthesize insights from multiple reports without having to comb through individual files.
• Legal teams can identify key clauses and references across case files, contracts, and legal documents in seconds.
• Sales teams can analyze trends, reports, and customer data to drive more informed and strategic decision-making.

Making Box AI more accessible

We’re incredibly excited to announce the rollout of Box AI capabilities to our customers on Business, Business Plus, and Enterprise plans. Users can now access document and image querying via Box Preview in the Box web app. We’re also enhancing this experience - with Box AI seamlessly embedded into the side panel, and enabling users to provide feedback on AI response quality in an easy and intuitive way. 

As organizations increasingly integrate AI into their user experiences and workflows, understanding and managing their AI usage becomes critical. Traditional pricing models often fall short when it comes to measuring the dynamic value AI delivers. 

Recognizing this need, Box is introducing Box AI Units as a new way to track and manage AI usage more transparently - including AI APIs. Each AI interaction — from querying content to extracting metadata — is quantified into discrete units, enabling businesses to forecast AI needs and optimize budgets with clarity and precision. 

Today, content can, and should, work for you. We want to help you transform your content from a valuable but passive resource, into an active source of knowledge and driver of automated workflows, unlocking its full potential and driving greater impact. To see Box’s extract agents and more in action, don’t miss our webinar!

* Source: IDC, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide IT Industry 2025 Predictions, October 28, 2024