Box has announced new features for Box AI, GPT-4o, support for images and spreadsheet files, and Box AI for Metadata API.
Additionally, the cloud content management company announced that organizations subscribing to the Enterprise Plus plan will get unlimited end-user queries on Box AI for Hubs, Documents, and Notes.
Box said the following enhancements to Box AI, a set of capabilities comprised of generative AI models natively integrated into the company's content cloud announced last year, are coming later this year: new GPT-4o support to benefit the company's AI-powered content portal Box Hubs, support for additional file types including natural language queries for image file formats, and the ability for developers to extract “critical information from large documents” via the Box AI for Metadata API.
“The combination of AI and unstructured data represents the largest untapped opportunity in enterprise IT,” the company's CTO Ben Kuss said in a news release.
Thomas Randall, director of AI market research at Info-Tech Research Group, said in an email that Kus is “right that the combination of AI and unstructured data is a huge opportunity. What's missing from this statement is the solution's ability to integrate such data across different silos. While organizations will benefit from optical character recognition for discovering and summarizing unstructured data, the real value is also ensuring that the solution can discover and integrate that data from disparate systems.”
If an organization only uses Box to store documents, “that solves the problem. If a company uses Box, SharePoint, Dropbox or other document management systems, the organization runs the risk of making inconsistent business decisions based on different data,” he says.
Regarding the overall launch, Randall said, “There's nothing significant from a technology innovation perspective. Rather, it's more that Box needs to launch its own generative AI capabilities to maintain competitive market share. Already, organizations have begun to leverage smaller, best-of-breed solutions that offer generative AI-driven knowledge bases and document management systems, document information extraction, and integrated business intelligence. In this context, Box is unlikely to get significant traction in new customer acquisition with its generative AI capabilities alone.”
Box says, “Access to GPT-4o for products like Box Hub, and support for new file types like images and spreadsheets in Box AI, will be available later this year and included in the Enterprise Plus plan.”
Meanwhile, the Box AI for Metadata API is currently available in beta to customers on the Enterprise Plus plan, and the company says it will announce pricing, along with pricing for other Box AI platform API calls and end-user metadata queries in core Box applications, closer to general availability.
Randall said these enhancements “will be a welcome addition to Box customers and prospects already considering Box. But Info-Tech first recommends that organizations put an AI governance strategy in place to ensure solutions like Box AI are utilized in the right context. Organizations should review the data Box AI retrieves for inconsistencies to ensure the solution isn't hallucinating or providing false responses.”
He said an organization's user base “also needs to be trained on rapid engineering and appropriate use cases. The danger is that these tools are deployed to untrained employees who then become overly reliant on generative AI and lose sight of the appropriate use of the solution, which is to use it only as an assistant.”
