The box begins life Nearly 20 years ago, in a dormitory at the University of Southern California, Aaron Levie conceived an online file storage and sharing system. After a few years, Levie’s original idea became commoditized and he pivoted to enterprise content management in the cloud. This was a radical concept in an industry dominated by local giants such as Microsoft, EMC, IBM, and OpenText.
Traditional enterprise content management, whether on-premises or in the cloud, involves storing, managing, protecting and governing unstructured content. This is always more difficult to work with than having information in neat columns and rows in a database.
Now, the industry is changing again, and Box is once again working to position itself at the forefront of this shift. Levie has always had a knack for seeing where the puck is going, and his company is embracing a software shift toward artificial intelligence and workflow automation.
Last year, Box acquired Croooze, a small company that specializes in workflow automation and metadata management and integrates with Box, making it a logical acquisition target. Being able to manage metadata is at the core of much automation in content management, as it provides software with a way to identify and understand content types when there is no other structure. This can help move different content types (be they files, videos, images or audio) through automated workflows and reduce a lot of monotonous tasks that were previously handled by bored and annoyed humans.
But what Box is doing with Crooze and generative artificial intelligence may be part of a larger shift in the content management industry, one that could be as significant as the shift from on-premises to the cloud that Box helped lead 15 years ago.
Make content work
Levie is confident in the possibilities that Crooze technology brings to this platform. “This is a very big thing. The way to think about it is that in Box, for the first time, you will be able to build code-less applications that allow you to surface content for any business process you want,” Levie told TechCrunch . In other words, users can create custom applications that reflect business processes and make content more useful.
He recognizes that a folder structure can only get you so far, especially when dealing with large amounts of unstructured content such as contracts. When browsing virtual folders, it can quickly become unwieldy trying to find a contract, let alone the more detailed parts of the contract.
“But with a codeless application development environment, you can build an actual dashboard that shows all your contracts, all the data within those contracts, and helps you automate the workflow around those contracts,” he said. This may involve editing, approval, electronic signatures, etc.
Generative AI also comes into play here, allowing users to query content in a folder to better understand it or locate specific content in a way that traditional enterprise search cannot. The summary feature provides users with the key points of a large cache of content without having to read every line. In terms of workflow, the coding capabilities of generative AI can help automatically build customized workflows based on specific needs.
Jason Ader, an analyst at William Blair who follows Box, said it feels like Box is entering a new phase. “Now I think we’re seeing Box 3.0, which is moving into artificial intelligence and workflow and really becoming core to the workflow of many vertical industries. These are related to contracts and digital assets in document-intensive industries, and frankly, artificial intelligence Intelligence can play a huge role because it can automate many tasks,” Ade said.
In fact, the way customers view content is changing. They no longer just want to manage it, but want to make it function in much the same way as data platforms like Snowflake and Databricks have moved beyond pure data management to building applications on top of it. It’s no longer enough to just put content in a repository, artificial intelligence is driving workflow automation and generating real business productivity results.
“Ultimately, enterprises want to leverage this content, not just store it, to drive automation and improve business outcomes,” said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder and principal analyst at Deep Analysis. “So acquisitions like Crooze provide a better Simple tools to develop these results. Crooze may be Box’s most important acquisition to date.”
The evolution of the content management industry
Box is not the only company driving this trend, but as generative AI improves the ability to generate content and query content stores, we are starting to see content management and knowledge management (business memory) merge together. Additionally, the ability to generate code allows companies to dynamically create custom workflows based on the requirements and type of content.
Forrester analyst Cheryl McKinnon, who has been managing content for two decades, said she sees the entire content management industry moving in the same direction as Box, which she believes is a natural progression. “I think this is just an uptick in the maturity curve, and this shift toward workflow and artificial intelligence is definitely where the market has been moving,” MacKinnon said. “This is an inflection point where it’s now more than just storing files and data. Clip, but can we put these things into use? Can we think about content not just from a storage perspective, but from an entire business activity perspective?”
Pelz-Sharpe said this is an important moment for the industry. “The entire ECM industry (including Box) now has its largest window of opportunity in 20 years, and the interest and embrace of leveraging artificial intelligence by organizations large and small has opened a window of opportunity for them,” he said.
He believes ECM companies are particularly well-positioned to take advantage of artificial intelligence because they already ensure the accuracy, relevance, security and timeliness of unstructured data. He said this is an important part of artificial intelligence models that is needed but is often missed. But the question is: Can Box and other companies execute and capitalize on this moment?
“It’s important to note that while this window of opportunity is real, there’s no guarantee that ECM companies will move to embrace it,” Pelz-Sharpe said. “For example, companies like Salesforce are realizing the importance of managing unstructured data, and so is Oracle. [and other industry giants]”.
“The advantage that Box and its ilk have right now is that they have the dedicated platform to do the job and, just as importantly, the deep skills and experience they have.”
