Box’s new AI agents can organize, find, and extract data from documents for you

Box

AI agents, as you’ve probably noticed, are all the rage in Silicon Valley. On Thursday, the content management platform Box joined a growing list of companies hoping to cash in on this latest tech trend. 

The new Box AI Agents are designed to help enterprise customers organize and retrieve critical information from files across the platform. 

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Like many new “agentic” products, the agents are promoted as time-saving tools that enterprise customers can harness to reduce mundane tasks that tend to eat up large chunks of employees’ workdays, like summarizing HR forms or pulling key details from lengthy contracts.

The agents are being released as part of Box AI, the company’s AI-powered content management tool, which debuted in late 2023.

Also: Tech leaders are rushing to deploy agentic AI, study shows

Box also announced the launch of an AI agent that can be integrated with Microsoft Copilot to access and move between platforms like Teams, Word, and PowerPoint. This cross-functionality is another key selling point for Box and companies pushing agents more broadly. 

Box

“The future of enterprise AI will be defined by intelligent agents that can work together across systems, each bringing unique context and capabilities to the table,” Aaron Levie, cofounder and CEO of Box, said in the release. “Just as APIs once connected software, AI agents will change the way we work — and that transformation will be most profound when applied to enterprise content.”

Agents are to more conventional chatbots (like ChatGPT) as a football team is to a single linebacker; the former consists of several integrated components, each acting toward a unified goal. An “agent architecture,” as it’s known in the field, enables these systems to retrieve information, formulate strategies, and autonomously take action on behalf of users; think of it like the playbook that dictates how a football team operates on the field. 

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Box AI Agents, for example, use a collection of AI models from Amazon, Anthropic, Google, IBM, Meta, OpenAI, and xAI. The system then adaptively pairs users with one specific model, depending on the nature of the query. 

Overall, the new agents are designed to make it easier for enterprise customers to sift through mountains of documents, much of which is siloed by division, client, and so on. 

Also: Microsoft 365 Copilot’s two new AI agents can speed up your workflow

“At the core of the new Box AI platform is a dynamic agentic reasoning framework designed to make sense of today’s complex content landscape,” the company wrote in the press release. “Box AI Agents operate where content lives.”

The new Box AI agents will be released in the coming months, along with pricing details, according to the company. 

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