AI And Automation Take Center Stage

BoxWorks 2025 brought together Box customers and partners in San Francisco this past September 11–12 with key announcements that underscore Box’s commitment to AI and its power to transform unstructured data … i.e., content.

Box’s vision has been consistent for years: one source of truth with unified, secure content storage. Box is now layering an AI foundation into its core content platform. The company does not view AI as just an add-on to an existing content management system but envisions it as an integral part of a core offering, available to all clients. This foundation includes model flexibility, optical character recognition (OCR), secure retrieval-augmented generation, vector embeddings, markdown conversion, and support for multiple file types.

Top Announcements

Box Automate: Box Automate (expected beta in early 2026) is a new AI agent-based workflow tool that will allow humans and agents to work together. Automate has an intuitive interface and provides a range of building blocks to build workflows, identify outcomes, use sophisticated conditional branching, and orchestrate actions across both agentic and nonagentic workflows. It integrates with existing Box capabilities such as document generation and e-signature and can extend into third-party applications via APIs. While Box has had its Box Relay routing/task management tool for several years, it has lacked a more robust workflow engine. Box Automate will help fill this feature gap. While Automate will coexist with Relay for some time, expect that Box Automate will be the future path for workflow within Box.
Box Extract: Box Extract extends Box’s intelligent document processing (IDP) capabilities allowing users to build and manage end-to-end data extraction processes. Extract is designed for the power users who would operate extraction workflows (i.e., for legal teams, finance, or operations), while Extract brings advanced OCR (such as hand-writing detection and table extraction), does math calculation, identifies and extracts metadata and taxonomy information, and provides confidence scoring. Extract also provides a document graph to help understand entities and parties in large, complex documents. Box Extract is built by the team from Alphamoon, the IDP provider acquired by Box in 2024. Extract Agents and APIs are available now, with the full Box Extract management console expected to be released in beta this November.
Enhancements to Box Apps: Box Apps (a no-code metadata and app design tool launched in early 2025) will be enhanced with natural language queries available on app metadata views and more data visualization. AI agents will also now be available in Box Apps. The agents could be Box-provided agents (such as Q&A, Compose, Extract, Search, and Research) or custom-built agents using Box Extract or Box AI Studio. Apps will also be embeddable in other applications such as Salesforce. Expect these new capabilities to be generally available over the next few quarters.
Box Shield Pro: Box Shield Pro is a new add-on module for Box Shield customers that will bring enhanced threat analysis, ransomware detection, and AI classification. The threat analysis capabilities will provide security teams with summaries and analysis to provide more insights and help them focus on threats. The ransomware detection protects information beyond Box, helping protect end users’ endpoints by detecting file activities that could signal an attack. Anomaly detection from these endpoints can compel an admin to act and terminate a session, lock users out of a device, and identify the files that have been affected.

AI-based classifications can inspect content, using context to define sensitivity and going well beyond rule-based approaches using keywords or text strings. This AI-based approach can look at nuances and take the overall meaning of a document into account, not relying on just rules and policies. It also understands context based on the author and who it is shared with. Classification labels are automatically applied, along with options for watermarking. This classification agent can also look at older managed documents, not just net-new ones added to Box. Box Shield Pro is expected to be generally available in 2025.

What It Means For Box Customers

Access to approachable AI optimized for enterprise content: Box has always invested in intuitive user interfaces and makes usability and simplicity priorities. This extends to its AI evolution, as well. Box customers have an opportunity to put a range of AI and AI agent capabilities into the hands of their end users, providing them with confidence that their information will remain secure, governed, and used appropriately. Box customers should look at their licensing tier to understand exactly what they’ll get as these new capabilities roll out and determine if it makes sense to look at more comprehensive licensing to get the full swath of AI innovation, rather than trying to build it themselves.