Box content management generative AI route is model-agnostic

Box has been in the AI game for a long time.

But when generative AI mushroomed into a transformative force in the tech world, the cloud content management vendor opted to turn to specialists in the new and fast-growing technology to power the arsenal of tools in its platform.

"We've been doing AI for many years. But the really cool thing that happened … AI got to the point where the generative AI models understood content," said Ben Kus, CTO at Box, on the Targeting AI podcast from Informa TechTarget. "For us, this whole generative AI revolution has been this great gift to everybody who deals with content. It's almost like having a very dedicated, very intelligent person who stands next to you, ready to do what you want."

When generative AI exploded with OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in November 2022, Box turned to OpenAI for its first batch of generative AI tools. Box CEO Aaron Levie had known OpenAI CEO and co-founder Sam Altman for many years.

However, when a passel of other independent generative AI vendors sprang up and the tech giants started releasing their own powerful large language models (LLMs) and multimodal models, Box decided to broaden its generative AI palette.

"Azure and OpenAI are partners of ours and we think they have great models, but we are not at all dedicated to any one model," Kus said. "In fact, at Box, one of our goals is to provide you with all of the major models that you might want."

These include generative AI models from Google, IBM, Anthropic and Amazon.

One example of how Box uses an outside model is Anthropic's 3.5 Sonnet LLM, which Kus called "one of the best models out there right now."

One application is at a financial firm that deals with long bond offerings. The company needs to analyze many of these complex financial vehicles to evaluate which bonds in which it wants to invest.

"They use [the model] to extract key info. It takes the [job] of looking through these bonds. From hours or days to … hopefully, minutes," Kus said. "If the model is very good, it can give you very good answers. If it's not as smart, then it can be off a little bit. So, this particular company really wants to have the best models so they can get the best sort of use of this kind of AI."

Shaun Sutner is senior news director for Informa TechTarget's information management team, driving coverage of artificial intelligence, unified communications, analytics and data management technologies. He is a veteran journalist with more than 30 years of news experience. Esther Shittu is an Informa TechTarget news writer and podcast host covering artificial intelligence software and systems.