Rashida Hodge, Vice President, Watson Embed and Strategic Partnerships, IBM
Jamie Young Perlman, Vice President & General Manager, IBM Partnership, Box

IBM and Box are excited to announce the availability of a new service offering from IBM to build custom Box Skills that apply Watson AI technologies to the Box Skills framework. These new, customizable solutions, built using the Box Skills Kit, will enable businesses to apply IBM’s enterprise-strength Watson AI technologies to enterprise content managed in Box. By bringing intelligence to enterprise content and by leveraging Watson to enrich that content stored in Box, businesses in every industry can accelerate their digital transformation journeys.

Why is this important? Content is at the heart of nearly every business process, across all kinds of industries. Maybe it’s a sales contract or proposal, an HR onboarding form or something as simple as a resume. Traditional documents aside, in today’s world, content is just as likely to mean huge amounts of images or hours of audio or video. In all of these cases today, AI technology has an incredible opportunity to turn that raw unstructured data into actionable information and metadata that can be used to inject more intelligence into the business -- and Box is the cloud content management platform for more than 69 percent of the Fortune 500. We are only at the beginning of what’s possible for AI in the enterprise.

Enriching Box Content with Watson

IBM is introducing two new services for building custom Box Skills:

• Custom image insights with Watson Visual Recognition: This custom solution analyzes image data, enriching it with classifiers to make it easy to search and consume, and training custom visual models that best address business needs. For example, an environmental organization could leverage a custom skill that can analyze satellite images of coastal erosion in Box, quickly detecting areas of most impact, speeding up the time to taking action and reducing the costs of monitoring.
• Custom document insights with Watson Natural Language Understanding: This custom skill automatically tags documents stored in Box with relevant concepts, entities, and keywords to enrich the content and make it more searchable and to help users quickly access specific information in dense documents like research papers, service manuals and legal documents. For lawyers working on time-sensitive matters, this could be the difference between making a court filing deadline and needing to file for a costly extension.

In addition to applying Watson technologies to Box Skills, the IBM team will also build custom solutions that apply Watson AI to Box via the Box Platform APIs for other use cases. For example, IBM has built a service that processes documents uploaded to Box to translate the documents in other languages. This automated process significantly reduces the time it takes a person to create translated versions of documents and enables multinational organizations to more quickly share and collaborate across not just multiple time zones, but multiple languages.

For more information on the new custom Box Skills powered by IBM Watson, join our webinar on July 10, 2018 at 9am PT/12pm ET and stay tuned for more exciting updates coming from IBM Watson and Box as we continue to bring AI to the enterprise.