Today at BoxWorks 2018, we announced several advancements to our 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.
Updates to the Box Skills framework
During today’s BoxWorks keynote, we announced that the Box Skills Kit -- which enables enterprise customers, 3rd-party developers and systems integrators to build custom AI integrations to enhance their content in Box – will be generally available in December 2018. We also announced support for custom-trained AI models in the Box Skills framework.
General availability of the Box Skills Kit
The Box Skills Kit is a developer toolkit for creating custom skills for Box that enhance content with rich insights. The kit, available now in a private beta, reduces the complexity of integrating AI services with Box and allows developers to take advantage any applicable AI service to enhance their content.
The Box Skills Kit is a set of APIs, developer documentation, and sample code that helps developers create custom skills. With the Box Skills Kit, developers can write integrations that apply AI services from nearly any third-party provider to process and extract insights from documents, images, audio, video and other types of content in Box. Developers can also use a series of metadata-driven UI "cards" to visualize the extracted information directly in the Box user experience, allowing employees to easily use this rich information in their day-to-day work.
During the BoxWorks Day 1 keynote, we also 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 Watson. “With the power of IBM Watson and IBM’s deep enterprise expertise, we’re working with leading enterprise 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.”
Developers can request access to the private beta on our developer website.
Support for Custom-trained AI Models
Many enterprise use cases for AI require capabilities beyond what pre-trained AI services can provide, like recognizing specific brands or products or identifying specific phrases or terms in audio transcriptions. 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, Google Cloud AutoML, Microsoft Azure Custom Vision and others to their content in Box via the Box Skills Kit.
For more information on Box Skills customers can contact their Box sales rep or visit box.com/skills.
Streamlining collaborative work with Box Tasks and Automations
We also announced updates to our 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:
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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 approval history.
With Box Automations it’s easy to:
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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.
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Support agile business processes: Since 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 & 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.
Box Tasks and Automations will be available in early 2019
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