Box is working with OpenAI to add generative AI tools

In the past six weeks, Salesforce, Adobe, Ada, and Forethought have announced generative AI initiatives. Box AI, the latest to announce its own version of the technology, will partner with OpenAI to launch the platform’s first tools.

Like many of the other companies making these announcements, they are working with early customers to refine their functionality. Box AI was chosen because the two features announced today are part of a larger product road map of AI being added to the platform in the coming months.

Box CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie says the new AI features will generate more content, but their real strength is helping people understand it. Large language models are exceptional at content reasoning. “And so a lot of the use cases that we’re excited about are actually ones where you can use the large language model, not as the database of knowledge, but as a reasoning engine to work through your data,” Levie told.

The company’s initial announcement focuses on two use cases. First, click the Box AI button and ask a document to “Summarize this document for me” or “What are five key points about this document?” Box’s generative AI will answer. Long reports or complicated contracts may benefit from this.

You can create quizzes and summaries by iterating over a document and asking more specific questions. The AI should improve as you do.

Box Notes lets you add content too. Take 10 bullet points from a new product meeting. Box AI, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, can instantly create a blog post from that list.

Levie says that eventually, you will be able to analyze multiple documents with refinements like the maximum age. This announcement does not include automated workflows, which are on the product roadmap.

The company is starting with OpenAI API, but it wants to be flexible enough to support any large language.