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Box consolidates AI tools, adds 'super agent' for complex tasks
Box Enterprise Plus and Enterprise Advanced users can take new AI functionality for a spin.
Box released an AI super agent to premium subscribers, which can gather data and create new files in formats including PDF and Microsoft 365 docs, spreadsheets and slide decks.
Enterprise Plus and Enterprise Advanced users now have access to Box Agent, which can interpret plain-language questions to search across their enterprise data, analyze document sets such as contracts or reports, and concatenate reports after extracting information. The ability to spin up files in Microsoft 365 and PDF formats is currently in beta for Enterprise Advanced users.
Also released for Enterprise Advanced subscribers are features in the Box AI Studio agent builder that enable Box users to configure their own custom versions of the Box Agent.
Box has been working on generative and agentic AI tools since the earliest days of ChatGPT. Recently, the company released Box Extract, which pulls content data from file repositories and tags it with metadata.
In the present SaaS world, vendors such as Box need to walk a line between broad integrations of AI and more task-oriented tools that let their users quickly derive value, said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder of Deep Analysis. Box's tools for creating marketing content, reviewing contracts and putting together requests for information (RFIs), requests for proposals (RFPs) and requests for quotes (RFQs) automate time-consuming bedrock content management tasks.
"People are asking for localized AI that does a good job on this job, not generic 'I can solve the world's problems and become smarter than a human being LLM'," Pelz-Sharpe said. "If you're creating an RFI, your AI is [small] and sits on a local server. All it does is help you create an RFI."
Whose AI is in charge?
Companies such as Qualtrics, Salesforce and ServiceNow are building AI orchestration platforms where advanced agents attempt to manage their own -- and everybody else's -- agents. While Box offers its AI Studio agent design platform, the company's philosophy is not to get into that orchestration race, said Ben Kus, chief technology officer at Box.
He believes the best practice now -- and moving forward -- will be for SaaS companies to build their agents to do what they do best: work on their own platforms. Anthropic Claude Cowork, OpenAI OpenClaw, Google Gemini and other companies' agents can knock at the door of data systems of record such as CRMs, HR or Box and hand off to those systems' own agents to manage security, data governance and privacy policies.
"We spend a lot of time making sure our agents work really well on our live data. We're just better at unstructured data than anyone else who has tried it. We have a whole team dedicated to doing this stuff well," Kus said.
"It's really hard to be this one agent that does everything perfectly, with full respect to all of our partners who do that kind of stuff -- Claude, OpenAI, Gemini and so on. We let them reach out and talk to our agents -- or talk to our platform."
Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.
