Aaron Levie leads Box into third era focused on workflow automation and AI

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Box was born in a dorm room at the University of Southern California nearly 20 years ago when Aaron Levy invented an online file storage and sharing system. A few years later, Levie’s original idea was becoming a commodity and he switched gears to enterprise content management in the cloud. This was a radical concept in an industry at the time dominated by on-premises giants like Microsoft, EMC, IBM, and OpenText.

Traditional enterprise content management involves storing, managing, securing, and managing unstructured content, whether on-premises or in the cloud. This has always been more difficult to handle than if the data were arranged in orderly columns and rows in a database.

Today, the industry is changing again, and Box is once again working to be at the forefront of that change. Levie has always had a knack for seeing the direction of the pack, and his company has embraced his software shift towards AI and workflow automation.

Last year, Box acquired Crooze, a small company specializing in workflow automation and metadata management with integration into Box, making it a natural acquisition target. Being able to manage metadata is central to much automation in content management, as it provides a way for software to identify and understand types of content when no other structure exists. This allows you to move different types of content, including documents, videos, images, and audio, into automated workflows, relieving many of the tedious tasks that were previously handled by boring, frustrated humans.

But what Box is doing with Crooze and generative AI could be part of a larger shift in the content management industry, from on-premises to the cloud that Box helped lead 15 years ago. can be as important as the transition to .

Leverage content

Levie is truly excited about the possibilities that Crooze technology brings to the platform. “This is huge. When you think about it, for the first time within Box you will be able to build no-code applications that can render the content of any business process you want,” Levie said. told TechCrunch. In other words, users can build custom applications that reflect their business processes and make their content even more useful.

He recognizes the limitations of folder structures alone, especially when dealing with large amounts of unstructured content like contracts. Trying to find a contract can quickly get out of hand if you’re digging around in virtual folders, without paying attention to the details of the contract.

“But with a no-code application development environment, you can build real dashboards that show all your contracts and all the data within those contracts and help you automate workflows around those contracts,” he said. Ta. This may include editing, approval, electronic signatures, etc.

Generative AI plays a role here as well, allowing users to query content within folders to better understand what’s inside or find specific parts in ways that traditional enterprise search can’t. A summary feature allows users to get the gist of caching large amounts of content without having to read every line. From a workflow perspective, generative AI’s coding capabilities can help you automatically build custom workflows based on your specific requirements.

William Blair analyst Jason Ader, who has been watching Box closely, said it feels like Box is entering a new phase. “I think we are now seeing Box 3.0, where we are moving into this realm of AI and workflows that are becoming central to workflows in many vertical industries. AI is playing a big role because it’s tied to contracts and digital assets in many types of industries, and frankly, AI can automate a lot of that work,” Adar said.

In fact, the way customers view content is changing. They no longer just want to manage data, they want to make it work in much the same way that data platforms like Snowflake and Databricks go beyond pure data management and build applications on top of it. . It’s no longer enough to simply have content in a storage repository, and AI is driving the push to automate workflows and generate actionable business productivity outcomes.

“At the end of the day, businesses don’t just want to store content, they want to leverage that content to drive automation and improve business outcomes,” said Deep Analysis Founder and Principal Analyst. Alan Pelz-Sharpe said. “Acquisitions like Crooze therefore provide simpler tools to develop these outcomes. Crooze is probably the most important acquisition Box has ever made.”

Evolution of the content management industry

Box is not alone in this endeavor, but as the ability of generative AI to generate content and query content stores advances, we will see content management and knowledge management (business memory) converge. I’m starting to see it. Additionally, the ability to generate code potentially allows companies to create custom workflows on the fly based on content requirements and types.

Cheryl McKinnon, a Forrester analyst who has covered managed content for 20 years, said she sees the entire content management industry moving in the same direction as Box, and believes it’s a natural progression. . “I think this is just moving up the maturity curve. This shift to workflow and AI is definitely where the market is moving,” McKinnon said. “This is kind of a tipping point, and can we leverage that beyond just storing files and folders? Can we think about content not just in terms of storage, but in the context of our overall business activities? ?”

Peltzsharp says this is a big moment for the entire industry. “The entire ECM sector (including Box) now has the biggest opportunity in 20 years, driven by the interest and acceptance of organizations large and small in leveraging AI,” he said.

He believes ECM companies in particular are well-positioned to leverage AI because they already ensure that their unstructured data is accurate, relevant, secure, and timely. This is an important part of AI models that is often missing, he said. But the question is, can Box and other companies execute and capitalize on this moment?

“It is important to note that while this window of opportunity is real, there is no guarantee that ECM companies will pivot to embrace it,” Peltzsharp said. “For example, companies like Salesforce, like Oracle, recognize the importance of managing unstructured data. [and other industry giants]”

“The advantage that Box and its ilk currently have is that they have a purpose-built platform to do this work, and just as importantly, they have the deep skillset and experience to bring it to bear. ”