Box brings generative AI to its content cloud with OpenAI

Box is adding some ChatGPT-style AI features to parts of its content management and collaboration platform. With “Box AI,” customers will be able to summarize text and brainstorm ideas within their documents stored in the Box cloud. The generative AI features are powered by OpenAI large language models (LLMs), which Box accesses via an application programming interface (API).



Initially, the AI features will show up in the Box Notes real-time online editor and content creation tool, and in the platform’s “preview” mode, which lets users preview any file type in full without opening it. A user might, for instance, ask questions about a text document, or ask for a summary, or ask the tool to pull out insights from a spreadsheet.



Box says the offering is unique because it allows enterprise customers to fuse their corporate intellegence with the intellegence of advanced generative AI models.



“What’s embedded within these models, like OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 or GPT-4, is the reasoning ability of a financial analyist or a marketer or a lawyer or an HR professional,” said Box CEO Aaron Levie in an interview Monday. “Where we think they can be mosts powerful is when you take the understanding within the AI model and combine that with enterprise content, and you intersect these two worlds together within a very safe, secure, privacy-oriented way.”



The enterprise’s data, including that sent back and forth from the Open model, is protected using enterprise-grade standards for security, compliance, and privacy, Box says.



Microsoft and Google are also attempting to apply generative AI capabilities to corporate data within its productivity and collaboration tools. Microsoft 365 (Excel, Teams, et al) uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 model (Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI). Google’s Workspace (Gmail, Docs, et al) gets its generative AI tools from the company’s PaLM large language model.



Box CEO Aaron Levie says enterprise users might see benefits from accessing generative AI on his platform that they wouldn’t get on those of commercial productivity suite providers. Aside from the security and privacy features they get, Levie says, they may benefit from Box’s agnostic approach to AI, which in the future may allow it to integrate with other LLMs, not just OpenAI‘s. Anthropic, AI21 Labs, and Cohere models may be candidates, but Box has not offered any specifics.



Box AI will first be used in roughly a dozen Box customers, then gradually grow to hundreds of companies in a private beta and finally reach general availabity. The company says it’ll announce pricing and packaging details for the new AI features when they become generally available.