Highlights from the Box Financial Services Summit
Navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of AI while managing vast amounts of sensitive, unstructured data presents a significant challenge for financial services organizations. Keeping up with innovation, automating complex, manual processes, and ensuring stringent security and compliance are critical, yet often feel like competing priorities.
Our recent Box Financial Services Summit addressed these very challenges headon, focusing on how the powerful combination of Content + AI can transform operations. If you weren’t able to make it, or just want a quick refresher on the key discussions, you’re in the right place! We’ll walk through the highlights, from the big picture vision shared by Box’s leadership to the practical ways AI is being built into the Box platform to transform how you manage and leverage your most important asset: your content.
Entering the AI-first era
Aaron Levie, Box CEO and co-founder, opened the summit by outlining the strategic shift towards an AI-first era of business. He emphasized the increasing role of AI agents in the workforce, enabling the automation of workflows, and driving productivity gains. This transformation is essential as organizations navigate the exponential growth of unstructured dataamid rising client expectations for enhanced digital experiences.
While unstructured data makes up a significant majority of information, it remains largely underutilized. For financial services organizations that manage vast amounts of valuable content daily, this presents a significant challenge, one that Box enables its key customers like Morgan Stanley, Block,and USAA to overcome. The traditional approaches to content management don't work as well anymore, demonstrating the need for an Intelligent Content Management platform.
Streamlining content workflows with Box AI
Catherine Powell, Sr. Director of Product Management for the Core Platform at Box, provided a detailed look at how Box is integrating AI directly into our platform. She explained that the main goal is to change how you work with your content by building AI right in. This is all based on key Box AI Principles:giving you full control, ensuring security, protecting privacy, and maintaining transparency — all critical for financial services.
A key Box capability is AI-powered data extraction which is essential for financial services, because it automatically pulls critical data from unstructured documents (like contracts and agreements) to create valuable metadata at scale. This extracted data (and the resulting metadata) are fundamental for powering intelligent processes crucial for financial operations, like enhanced data protection and classification with Box Shield and compliant archiving with Box Archive — directly addressing regulatory and governance needs. On top of that, this extracted data fuels the automation of content-centric workflows, enabling the creation of intelligent, no-code applications in Box Apps to streamline processes like contract management and client onboarding, making use of the insights provided by the extracted data.
As AI models advance, the focus is shifting towards powerful AI agents capable of solving complex problems, with Box AI Studio serving as the center for creating and managing these agents, often utilizing the data made accessible through extraction.
Box is built to be model neutral—meaning you aren't limited to just one AI provider or model. You can access and use a wide range of top AI models directly within the platform, letting you select the best model for each specific task and tailor the AI capabilities exactly to your needs and workflows.
Driving efficiency: Insights from the AI thought leadership panel
The summit also featured an insightful panel discussion focused on AI thought leadership. Moderated by Perry Rotella, Managing Director of Financial Services at Box, this session brought together industry experts to share perspectives on the strategic implications and adoption of AI within the financial services sector. The panel included Araya Solomon, Managing Director for Wealth and Asset Management and Capital Markets at Slalom, and Chris Riotta, Managing Editor at iSMG.
The discussion underscored the significant challenges financial services face in managing unstructured data, ensuring security, and streamlining processes like onboarding. Araya highlighted the potential for significant efficiency gains through AI solutions. Araya Solomon shared a powerful example of the impact AI can have:
“We have a couple case studies where we’ve, helped clients go from 30 day onboarding to three days, for example.”
He specifically stated that technologies like Box have been “central to being able to support that,” referring helping Slalom’s clients navigate these data complexities and improve workflows. Araya further noted that Box's reliability is so significant that many fintech companies and compliance solution providers use Box as an underlying, white-labeled solution, calling it "a testament to the actual solution itself"—highlighting Box's strength as a trusted, foundational platform in the financial ecosystem. Meanwhile, Riotta emphasized the importance of robust security, a critical concern in the industry. Together, their remarks underscored that Box provides the secure, reliable foundation organizations need to unlock the full value of unstructured data and AI.
Winning together in the AI Era: Insights from the partner panel
A partnerpanel moderated by Pegi Karger, Sr. Director of Business Development at Box, highlighted the strength of our partner ecosystem in bringing AI-powered content solutions to market, showcasing how collaboration drives comprehensive solutions in the financial services industry. Panelists included:
- Matt Charlson, President & CEO at Databank
- Casey Trujillo, SVP of Partner Adoption at Brainstorm
- Adam Storch, Chief Solutions Officer at MicroStrategies
- Daria Khoyi, Global AI Partnerships - Financial Services at IBM
- Jeffrey Sinofsky, VP of Customer Professional Services at MHC
The discussion focused on key aspects of AI adoption in financial services, such as the critical importance of security, the potential for AI in content creation, and the need to prioritize end-user adoption for successful implementation. Each partner shared how they leverage Box’s platform to deliver value: for example, MHC demonstrated how they feed AI-generated content into Box to organize information, while Brainstorm described their success in training users on Box AI to help them find and process unstructured data more effectively. Trujillo provided a real-world example from a recent event:
“One of our customers took advantage of this. Within the first 32 days, they trained half of their organization—not forced training, they just introduced Box AI to them. At the end of the education, we asked them, okay, now how do you feel about Box? 88% of employees said they are having a positive Box AI experience.”
Together, Box and its partners are helping organizations realize the full potential of AI by focusing on secure, user-friendly, and impactful implementations.
Unlocking value with Content + AI in financial services
The Box Financial Services Summit showcased how Content + AI is transforming financial services. By integrating AI directly into the platform, Box enables you to unlock intelligence from unstructured data, automate critical processes for efficiency, and ensure security and compliance. Box + AI offers a secure, intelligent foundation to maximize the value of your content and drive productivity in the AI-first era.
To explore how Content + AI can benefit your financial services organization, visit our Box financial services page and join us at BoxWorks 2025 on September 11-12 in San Francisco or virtually!