Box Skills Kit to be Generally Available in December 2018

SAN FRANCISCO–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Today at BoxWorks 2018, Box (NYSE:BOX) announced several advancements to its cloud content management platform, including updates to Box Skills — the company’s breakthrough framework for applying state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technologies to content in Box – and the unveiling of new tasks and automations capabilities to drive digital business transformation.

“Digital businesses run on data. Artificial intelligence has the potential to unlock incredible insights, and we are building the world’s best framework, in Box Skills, for bringing that intelligence to enterprise content,” said Jeetu Patel, Chief Product Officer at Box. “There will be more change in enterprise content management in the next five years than we’ve seen in the last twenty years combined, and by bringing intelligence and simple, but powerful automation to cloud content management, Box will help our customers become more data-driven, responsive and agile.”

Updates to the Box Skills framework

During today’s BoxWorks keynote, Box announced that the Box Skills Kit — which enables enterprise customers, third party developers and systems integrators to build custom AI integrations with Box to enhance enterprise content – is scheduled to be generally available in December 2018. The company also announced support for custom-trained AI models in Box Skills.

General availability of the Box Skills Kit

The Box Skills Kit is a developer toolkit that allows enterprise customers, third party developers and systems integrators to create custom AI integrations with Box to enhance enterprise content with rich insights. The kit, available now in a private beta, makes it easy to integrate any applicable AI service into Box with minimal code.

Box highlighted several partners participating in the Box Skills Kit beta program, including IBM, Deloitte, Robots & Pencils, Codelitt, and AIM Consulting, building highly customized AI solutions for driving digital transformation.

“Businesses today are managing more data than ever before, and the vast majority of that data lives in unstructured formats,” said David Kenny, Senior Vice President, IBM Cognitive Solutions. “With the power of IBM Watson and IBM’s deep enterprise expertise, we’re working with leading businesses including ATB Financial, H&R Block Canada, and U.S. Legal Support to create custom AI solutions that enable digital transformation across multiple industries with Box Skills.”

Support for Custom-trained AI Models

The support for custom-trained AI models with Box Skills makes it easy for enterprises to apply customized AI models — created using services like IBM Watson Studio, Azure Custom Vision, Google Cloud AutoML, or AWS SageMaker — to their content in Box via the Box Skills Kit. Custom training enables businesses to address more specific use cases for AI, like identifying and tagging images of proprietary brands or products or identifying phrases specific to their business in audio transcripts. Support for custom-trained AI models is available to any business creating custom skills using the Box Skills Kit and allows customers to use the custom training service of their choice.

Streamlining Collaborative Work with Box Tasks and Automations

Box also announced updates to its core task and automation capabilities, enabling users to create lightweight, simple triggers for recurrent actions that augment the collaborative work they do every day. For example, trigger a monthly automation to copy the financial close checklist and send a task for individuals to complete. With Box Tasks and Automations, teams can collaborate more easily, be more agile, and keep tasks like simple content reviews and approvals on track. Box Tasks provides for one-step content reviews and approvals right from within the file preview experience on Box to easily move processes along.

Box Tasks provides:

• • Seamless integration into the Box collaboration experience: Tasks are shown within the activity stream where commenting and sharing activity is shown, providing a complete and connected view of relevant activity and information.

• Visibility into process details: Details about who has approved, rejected or not yet completed a task will show up right next to a file, so it’s easy to see progress and keep the team on task. And – as opposed to most approvals that happen verbally, over email, or in other settings – approvals within Tasks are auditable and trackable with exportable approval history.

With the all new Automations, users can automate actions and tasks in Box. With a new redesigned no-code builder and an array of ‘ifs’ and ‘thens’ to choose from, Admins and power-users will be able to create their own conditional mashups to streamline work.

With Box Automations it’s easy to:

• • Quickly customize or create repetitive actions: Create an automation with just a few clicks, string together multiple steps in a single automation, or leverage the pre-built examples to create an automation in seconds.

• Support agile business processes: Because automations can support an array of over 20 types of inputs and outputs, users can now automate nearly any activity in Box. Action occurring within the metadata, file, folder or event at a specific time now gives users the agility they need to better support the ever-changing processes.

With the new updates to Box Tasks and Automations, both internal and external collaborators can take action directly from the file preview, enabling work to get done faster and more efficiently, while maintaining the security and compliance benefits of Box.

Pricing and Availability

• • For more information on Box Skills and to sign up for the ongoing beta, customers can contact their Box sales rep or visit https://www.box.com/skills

• Box Tasks and Automations is scheduled to be available in early 2019

About Box

Box (NYSE:BOX) is the cloud content management company that empowers enterprises to revolutionize how they work by securely connecting their people, information and applications. Founded in 2005, Box powers more than 87,000 businesses globally, including AstraZeneca, General Electric, P&G, and The GAP. Box is headquartered in Redwood City, CA, with offices across the United States, Europe and Asia. To learn more about Box, visit http://www.box.com.

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Source: Box