Box adds AI agent and no-code app builder tools

Box is developing new AI and automation tools to help customers tap into unstructured data stored in its content management platform; Box AI Studio and Box Apps were both unveiled at the company’s Box Works event Tuesday. 

Box AI Studio lets customers build custom AI agents that workers can interact with via a natural language chatbot. Each agent can be prompted to respond in a particular way to specific groups of workers. There could be a legal contract review agent that knows all about a company’s contracting policies, for example, or a sales agent that staff can consult for advice. 

“You could be inside of your sales portal, trying to get sales advice for a deal you’re working on, and talk to the sales agent that’s using the information from within your sales portal,” said Box CEO and founder Aaron Levie.

The agents are built with a no-code interface, with customers able to select large language models (LLMs) from third-party providers such as Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft. 

“Then we’re going to obviously have to figure out how we get the agents to all interact with each other — that’s going be the next frontier of interoperability,” Levie said.

Generative AI (genAI) technologies such as Box AI Studio will “disrupt how organizations create, manage and leverage unstructured content and documents” said Holly Muscolino, group vice president for Workplace Solutions at IDC. While business adoption of genAI has been slow so far — due lack of clear ROI, trust around data access, and change management challenges when deploying tools to workers — there’s potential for “large improvements in productivity, customer and employee experience and other business metrics,” she said. 

Box is rolling out generative AI tools designed to help users build custom AI agents they can interact with via a chatbot.
Box

“We believe that they will eventually be table stakes and part of baseline solutions. Note that Box is not unique in rolling out these capabilities, but they are very good at marketing them,” Muscolino said. 

AI Studio is just the first step in Box’s vision for AI agents: Levie said the company is also working on “agentic workflows” that will let customers build AI assistants that can be set up to act autonomously on behalf of workers; these will arrive in the “medium term,” with no specific timeline set. 

“We anticipate that any knowledge worker within an enterprise will probably be interacting with dozens, if not hundreds, of agents to do their work,” said Levie. 

Not all those agents will be created within Box, he said, with all software vendors eventually creating their own agents. “You’ll have one agent help you with a contract process, another review information for some strategic decision, and another that gets your calendar organized,” he said. 

The other major feature addition unveiled Tuesday is Box Apps, a no-code app development framework that includes features such as a custom UI interface, metadata extraction, workflow automations, and content dashboards.

The idea is to automate common content-intensive businesses processes such as contract management and invoice processing. To run these processes, customers would typically have to either build an entire custom app on top of Box’s APIs, or use bespoke technology platforms, said Levie. This means customers must move data out of the Box platform, bypassing security controls in place. 

With Box Apps, these custom apps can be created directly within Box. “You can have a contract management system, you can have an invoice processing system, you can have a digital asset management system, and in a matter of hours, if not minutes, you can build that entire application and deploy it to people in your organization,” said Levie. 

“So, this is going to be a real kind of a breakthrough in delivering no-code applications for every business process in the enterprise.”

Box Apps is built on technology from business process app builder Crooze — one of two acquisitions Box made this year. Box also intends to release functionality based on another recent acquisition, Polish startup Alphamoon, next year, said Levie. 

“Both of those acquisitions added important capabilities to Box’s portfolio by providing data extraction and metadata management,” said Muscolino. 

Box AI Studio and Box Apps will be available in January in a new Enterprise Advanced payment plan that will also include premium features such as Box Archive for long-term content management, and Doc Gen, a custom document creation tool now in a beta preview. Enterprise Advanced will be the next tier up from the Enterprise Plus plan that arrived in 2021. 

Box said it would announce pricing for Enterprise Advanced closer to launch. 

Muscolino noted that pricing for genAI tools is “still all over the place.” While customers may be happy to pay additional fees for the latest AI-powered features, many of these will eventually … be an expected component of a content management system,” she said.

“Of course, prices won’t come down, but these features will not command a premium,” said Muscolino.