Box’s new AI features help unlock dormant data

Users will be able to do more with files stored in Box’s cloud service with new AI features announced by the company this week at its BoxWorks event.

The features will allow customers to extract and understand previously untouched information stored in documents and other files. These new features include safeguards that protect the data from being misused.

Stored in a mishmash of documents and other files, up to 90% of information held by companies could go unused, according to Box. The company hopes the new features will unlock such “unstructured data” and add it to workflows to make employees productive.

AI provides a technique to extract value from this untapped resource, said Ben Kus, chief technology officer at Box. To use the widely scattered data properly requires preparation, organization, and interpretation to make sure it is applied accurately, Kus said.

Box Extract uses reasoning to dig deep and extract relevant information. The AI technology ingests the data, reasons and extracts context, matches patterns, reorganizes the information by placing it in fields, and then draws correlations from the new structure. In a way, it restructures unstructured data with smarter analysis by AI.

“Unstructured data is cool again. All of a sudden it’s not just about making it available in the cloud, securing it, or collaboration, but it’s about doing all that and AI,” Kus said.

Box Shield Pro is a security feature that protects information from being misused or maliciously accessed. The safeguards enhance manual controls by using AI to automatically classify and label sensitive content. Administrators can establish AI-powered policies that automatically identify what information should be considered classified, rather than manually tagging every document.

“Which means the moment a document gets uploaded into Box, we go through it, we try to understand if there are classification policies, we try to classify the document, and then you have downstream security controls,” said Manoj Asnani, vice president of product management for security and privacy at Box.

The feature is especially important in sectors like finance and healthcare, which have strict procedures to comply with regulations.

The security feature also does threat analysis and notifies administrators about ransomware threats.

Box Extract will be available to customers on Enterprise Advanced plans in coming months. Box Shield Pro will be available as an add-on for Box Shield, Enterprise Plus, and Enterprise Advanced customers later this year.

Box has huge amounts of data stored within its cloud, and much of it is not readily accessible to the AI systems that organizations are investigating, said Jack Gold, principal analyst at J. Gold Associates.

“Unstructured data is particularly hard for data consolidation and AI learning, so if Box can really preprocess that to obtain the kernels of knowledge that can then be fed into an AI system so it better understands the local information, it’s a real advantage,” Gold said.

Personalized data is more accurate than just using a massive LLM trained on public data, so it could be a good way to make AI more accurate, Gold said.

“Augmented AI systems trained on local, more pertinent data are more accurate and better tuned to get the best results. This is especially advantageous when you want an agent to take actions for you,” Gold said.

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Relying on file storage heritage, Box pivots to AI

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