Box to bring AI to a reluctant enterprise market

By Jon Swartz

While much has been made of consumer use of AI, large companies have been hesitant to adopt OpenAI due to security and compliance concerns

Box Inc. on Tuesday announced new artificial-intelligence capabilities and outlined its blueprint to bring AI to an enterprise market that still has some doubts about tech's latest craze.

The company (BOX) unveiled a set of features with OpenAI that Box will be able to plug into the most advanced artificial-intelligence models from every vendor while providing advanced security and compliance.

Among the potential uses are the ability to summarize a lengthy contract and highlight risky clauses or to create a meeting agenda based on copious notes from a previous meeting.

"The use case is pretty profound. For the first time ever, you can use computers to reason through unstructured data for tens of billions of files," Box Chief Executive Aaron Levie said in an interview. "We're combining enterprise content to AI models for business insights and predictions."

He added: "This is a pretty revolutionary way to synthesize your content. We are at the very beginning of a new era for Box."

During a Zoom interview, Levie asked the Box AI bot a couple of questions on behalf of MarketWatch. When queried about its potential impact on the company's bottom line, the bot replied: "Yes, this is a significant announcement for Box. Overall, these developments have the potential to transform how work gets done within organizations that use the [Box Content Cloud] platform."

Box's full-throated entry into AI -- at the same time that Salesforce Inc. (CRM), ServiceNow Inc. (NOW) and other enterprise players are also making deeper plunges -- marks a crucial new phase of the technology's broader development. If companies don't keep up, they could end up in a situation like that of Dropbox Inc. (DBX), which last week said it was cutting 16% of its workforce in order to focus on hiring people with AI skills.

But while much has been made of consumer use of AI, large companies so far have been reluctant to adopt OpenAI due to security and compliance concerns.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), for example, is temporarily clamping down on the use of ChatGPT among its employees, according to a Bloomberg report. The decision was based on limits to third-party software due to compliance concerns and was not the result of a particular issue, the report said. JPMorgan Chase declined to comment.

Last week, however, PwC US announcedplans to invest $1 billion over the next three years to expand and scale AI offerings and help clients implement the technology.

-Jon Swartz

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05-02-23 0801ET

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