Intelligent Content Management innovations at BoxWorks 2024
Organizations today need a better way to automate processes, extract insights, power collaboration, and protect valuable content. It’s time to embrace the future of work by bringing AI to your content with Intelligent Content Management.
While intelligent may be the key word here, content is the foundation that makes intelligence possible. In fact, content — also known as unstructured data — makes up 90% of every organization’s data, and it’s the most important asset. With the recent innovations in large language models (LLMs), AI is the biggest lever to tap into all that content.
But not just any AI — AI on a secure, centralized content platform, with the principles in place to enable the responsible use of enterprise-grade AI.
This year, at BoxWorks, the concept of Intelligent Content Management underpinned nearly every presentation and conversation, detailing how the new era of work will revolve around the now-tappable value of once-untapped content.
Welcome to Intelligent Content Management
Some organizations have fully embraced digital transformation. Others are just beginning their journey with content management in the cloud. But all organizations, regardless of their progress along the path of digital transformation, stand to take advantage of major opportunities in the new era of Intelligent Content Management.
Recently, Box surveyed market-leading enterprises across North America, Europe, and Asia to find out what they’re prioritizing when implementing a modern content management platform. These leaders, who are ahead of the curve, are 3X more likely to list AI-powered intelligence as a KPI than those just beginning their content management journey.*
Our research report also shows that organizations are particularly focused on building a content strategy that’s both scalable and flexible, ensuring security and compliance and using AI-powered features to optimize workflow automation.
92% of market-leading enterprises say they’re prioritizing enhancing content security and compliance as part of their content management strategy*
The Intelligent Content Cloud delivers enterprise-grade AI, seamless collaboration and workflow experiences, along with advanced data protection and compliance — all on a flexible platform. For the first time ever, businesses of all sizes will be able to realize the full value of their content and leverage the data inside their files to drive innovation, automate processes, and secure their most important information — at a fraction of the cost of legacy systems.
“Box continues to add innovative capabilities to its Intelligent Content Management platform to support the content life cycle including, most recently, metadata management and generative AI, enabling users to generate additional business value from unstructured data.”
— BoxWorks attendee Holly Muscolino, Group Vice President, IDC, Workplace Solutions
AI tailored to every kind and size of business
Today, when leaders go about creating a content management strategy, AI is priority number one. Most organizations prioritize AI for content management — and 63% of market leaders say they view AI and machine learning (ML) as critical components of their content management strategy. Over half say they plan to invest more in leveraging AI and ML.*
AI is now being used in every aspect of business, and it's clear we've come a long way — but there’s more work to be done. With new AI models and use cases popping up every day, it’s important to have the right AI partner to help you leverage the latest technologies in a secure way and stay on top of the continuously evolving AI landscape.
Last year, Box introduced Box AI to help our customers apply secure, enterprise-grade AI to their content. Since then, we’ve enabled unlimited Box AI queries to power intelligent collaboration on documents, Box Notes, and Box Hubs — intelligent portals for curating and publishing content that became generally available to Box Enterprise and Enterprise Plus customers in September.
Box AI, initially an AI assistant that could answer questions or generate content, has evolved into a powerful platform enabling enterprises to apply AI to complex use cases. This year's BoxWorks highlighted Box AI Studio, a major step in this evolution and the newest addition to our existing suite of purpose-built, enterprise-grade AI offerings. Box AI Studio enables businesses to create and deploy powerful Box AI agents specifically tailored to their unique needs — for instance, asking Box AI to act as a consulting expert that helps teams understand IT compliance postures to help address client concerns.
Box customers can now choose from a variety of models offered by our trusted AI model partners and customize their agent prompts with specific instructions — like how to respond to a particular question in a way that reflects the business’s context and the brand tone. These personalized agents can then be used to help perform tasks and get insights in a precise and standardized way, enabling organizations to leverage them for specific workflows and deliver the most relevant and accurate results.
Box AI Studio will roll out in January 2025.
In talking about AI at BoxWorks, we didn’t shy away from the issue of content security. We laid the groundwork for the Box AI security approach with the Box AI Principles published in 2023, and we’ve now extended this approach to Box AI agents. With Box AI Studio, admins can ensure that AI agents are tailored to specific use cases and made available only to end users who need to access them to complete certain tasks. For instance, only authorized sales staff would have access to a virtual sales assistant agent.
Additional AI-related BoxWorks announcements included new integrations with Microsoft Copilot Studio and Vertex AI Studio, enabling developers to build AI applications that leverage their content to accelerate business processes.
Seamless, AI-powered workflow automation
Workflow automation is a massive priority for today’s organizations. With the great majority of data in the form of content, workflows that involve content are where you can make the biggest impact on business efficiency. The recent Box report found that when it comes to the content management journey, market leaders are 25% more likely than beginners to have successfully integrated content management processes into existing workflows. And 68% of leaders identify AI-powered features and intelligent content processing as crucial technical factors driving their success.*
In fact, leading enterprises are three times as likely to prioritize AI-powered intelligence as a top KPI for content management strategies than lagging enterprises.*
But manual work is still holding organizations back, and many of today’s solutions are unable to overcome this challenge. Legacy ECM systems are outdated, stitching together multiple tools is an IT nightmare, and building custom applications for each business process is impractical. And all these solutions suffer from a foundational issue: information critical to decision-making and workflow automation is trapped within content and difficult to extract. This information, known as metadata, needs to be easily accessible.
Secure AI-powered metadata extraction on the Intelligent Content Cloud is one of our biggest announcements in this area. It enables you to extract metadata from content at scale, and use it to organize and search content better and to power workflows in your organization. For example, extracting expiry dates from contracts will enable you to renew contracts in time to ensure business continuity. Extracting payment amounts from invoices can help route payment approvals to the right people based on your organization’s business rules. You can now do these things at scale to supercharge productivity across your organization
Organizations typically have point tools in their tech stack — one for publishing forms, another for document generation, yet another for e-signature, and so on. Another big BoxWorks announcement: Box Forms will streamline form-based business processes natively in Box.
Forms allows users to easily design and publish engaging web and mobile forms and seamlessly connect form submissions to downstream steps like review and approval (via Box Relay), e-signature (via Box Sign), and more.
And with Box Doc Gen, users can dynamically generate custom documents at scale by pulling data from a variety of sources, including Box Forms, metadata, and third party and custom applications. The Box for Salesforce integration has also been enhanced with Doc Gen capabilities to automatically generate documents using information from Salesforce records.
Finally, we announced a game-changing new product: Box Apps, intelligent no-code apps to power your business. Box Apps enables teams to create bespoke apps finely tuned to business and user needs — where tailored content meets integrated workflow automation, making it easier than ever to build applications for critical business processes and across all lines of business.
For example, an HR team can create a policy app to manage the process of creating, updating, and maintaining employee policies and procedures. With a contracts app, a legal team can get a clear view of items that need attention, like expiring agreements, and quickly spot key information that’s missing, like contract dates. It’s also easy to automate a process like contract renewal, tying together Box Doc Gen, Box Relay, and Box Sign to create the contract and gather signatures.
Box Apps creates opportunities to customize all kinds of workflows — from invoice processing to employee onboarding and many more — streamlining content experiences with apps, dashboards, and metadata views. Together, the brand-new Box Apps, Box Forms, and Box Doc Gen — along with existing Box products like Box Relay and Box Sign — will deliver a powerful, integrated, intelligent workflow automation solution.
Advanced data protection and compliance
You can’t have innovation without content security, but there's a major security gap: 87% of IT directors and IT managers list enhancing security and compliance as top of mind with their content management strategy. But only a third of them (34%) say they are very successful at it right now.*
For instance, many organizations have to keep inactive content either for business goals or to meet compliance obligations, and as the amount of business data continues to increase, the challenge of enterprise content preservation grows just as fast. At BoxWorks, our first compliance-related announcement was to introduce Box Archive, which streamlines compliance with long-term content preservation, ensuring your data is protected, compliant, and preserved for long-term storage — and it’s built on the Box Platform, providing a single, centralized location for all states of the content lifecycle.
We created Box Archive to give admins instant access to archived content within Box, from anywhere, without delay. At the same time, Box Archive ensures controlled access to archived content by maintaining enterprise ownership, removing it from user files and search results so users stay focused on active work.
A BoxWorks security announcement was Box Shield Content Recovery, poised to help organizations rapidly recover content from ransomware attacks with precision, restoring thousands of files in hours instead of days. Regardless of the scale of an incident, Box Shield Content Recovery will quickly get you up and running with a streamlined restoration process that empowers admins to select the content they’d like to recover and restore it in a matter of clicks. And, key, Box Shield Content Recovery automatically syncs to Box Drive.
Box is also making enhancements to our enterprise admin console: Content Manager helps admins govern and secure content wherever it is in its lifecycle.
All on a single, flexible platform
IT leaders are striving, and sometimes struggling, to implement secure AI at their organizations. They're experiencing challenges and delays in getting the right guidelines in place and are evaluating the tools they need to leverage AI securely and compliantly.
Notably, leaders are more than twice as likely than laggards to prefer an open-architecture content management system to a closed one. And 89% of market leaders prioritize reducing storage costs and optimizing infrastructure in order to get away from a reliance on siloed systems, enable better integration, and reduce manual labor and its associated costs.* To accomplish this, they will likely need a variety of tools to help them connect systems and create efficiencies across their tech stack.
Box Platform is a critical part of the toolbox for “all things content,” giving developers the ability to get up to speed quickly without having to build their own content services. We’ve seen hundreds of thousands of developers building a wide range of applications and solutions with Box Platform to power their businesses.
At BoxWorks, we announced even more developer tools to drive Intelligent Content Management use cases, including the Doc Gen API and Box AI API Metadata Extract (both coming soon), along with the Box AI API (now GA), giving developers the flexibility to choose their own model (CYOM) from a best-in-class selection of supported AI models. Plus, developers have plenty of rich, interactive opportunities to get started via the Box AI Developer Zone or Box UI Elements.
Newly announced AI model partnerships will enable developers to leverage more models in Box, including Amazon’s Bedrock and Titan, Anthropic, and reinforcements to Azure and Google Cloud. We also announced developer partnerships with LangChain, LlamaIndex, and Pinecone.
Extending Box to the entire community
We're also thrilled to announce a global funding opportunity to nonprofits through Box.org, our social impact arm. The Box Impact Fund, in its fourth year, is now taking applications from organizations pursuing digital transformation to escalate their work in the areas of child welfare, crisis response, and the environment. Six grantees will each receive a grant for $25,000 (for a total of $150,000 granted). New this year is a focus on projects that involve AI as part of their efforts to digitally transform the nonprofit workplace. Read more and apply here.
We continue to focus on our broader communities with support through Box.org, and we’re proud to support more than 11,000 nonprofit organizations with donated and discounted technology to help them create a significant impact on changing the world. Always an important element of BoxWorks, this year we featured three nonprofit organizations using Box to further their missions: Foster Nation, The International Rescue Committee, and The Nature Conservancy.
Lastly, we know the path to the future of work isn’t always easy. We’re seeing more and more organizations leverage systems integrators to take the Intelligent Content Cloud to new heights: to fine-tune and customize their AI programs and develop the exact workflows to incorporate AI. One of the leaders in this space is Slalom, recognized by Forbes as one of the world’s best consulting firms. At BoxWorks, we announced a first-of-its-kind partnership: Box and Slalom will work together to help organizations across industries leverage the full power of AI, getting the most value from their unstructured data.
Bringing Intelligent Content Management to everyone
The Intelligent Content Cloud is designed to help your business run faster, smart, and better — speeding up execution, enabling decision-making with AI technology, and minimizing human error to reduce business risk. To that end, Intelligent Content Management is changing the game for businesses of all sizes.
To support all of this exciting AI product news, we also announced a new pricing plan option: Enterprise Advanced, which combines the full power of the Intelligent Content Cloud into a single offering.
Enterprise Advanced will include new products like Box AI Studio, Box Apps, Box Forms, Box Doc Gen, and Box Archive — plus 500GB file uploads, enhanced developer tools, and higher API allocation – as well as all of the current capabilities in the Enterprise Plus plan. Contact us for more information.
Dive into the full BoxWorks replay to learn more about Intelligent Content Management, or visit our BoxWorks Box Hub to pick and choose the content you’d like to read and watch.
*Source: The Path to Intelligent Content Management
The Box product roadmap and features are subject to change. The development, release and timing of any Box products or features described in this blog are (a) at the sole discretion of Box and (b) subject to certain assumptions regarding available resources, product plans and other information available to Box as of the date of this post. The information in this post is not a commitment, promise or legal obligation to deliver any specific features, code or functionality. Customers should make any purchasing decisions based on Box product features and functionality that are currently available.