The box began life It was nearly 20 years ago in a dorm room at the University of Southern California when Aaron Levy conceived of a system for storing and sharing files over the Internet. A few years later, Levy's original idea became commoditized, and he shifted gears to managing enterprise content in the cloud. It was a radical idea at the time in an industry that was dominated by homegrown giants like Microsoft, EMC, IBM, and OpenText.
Traditional enterprise content management, whether on-premises or in the cloud, involves storing, managing, securing, and managing unstructured content. This has always been more difficult to deal with than dealing with data in ordered columns and rows in a database.
Today, the industry is changing once again, and Box is once again working to position itself at the forefront of this transformation. Levy has always had a knack for seeing where the ball is going, and his company is embracing the software shift toward artificial intelligence and workflow automation.
Last year, Box bought Crooze, a small company that specializes in workflow automation and metadata management with integration with Box, making it a logical acquisition target. The ability to manage metadata is key to much of the automation in content management because it provides a way for software to identify and understand the type of content when no other structure exists. This can help move different types of content – whether documents, videos, images or audio – through automated workflows and reduce a lot of the monotonous tasks that were previously handled by bored and annoyed humans.
But what Box does with Crooze and generative AI may be part of a larger shift in the content management industry, one that may be just as important as the move from on-premises to the cloud that Box helped lead 15 years ago.
Putting content to work
Levy is very excited about the possibilities that Crooze's technology can bring to the platform. “This is a pretty big deal. “The way to think about it is that for the first time ever inside Box, you'll be able to build no-code apps that let you expose your content to whatever business process you want,” Levy told TechCrunch. In other words, it can Users create custom applications that reflect business processes and make content more useful.
He realizes that folder structure can only get you so far, especially when dealing with large amounts of unstructured content like contracts, for example. It quickly becomes impractical to try to find a contract, let alone the more detailed parts of a contract, when searching through virtual folders.
“But with a no-code application development environment, you can create a physical dashboard that shows all of your contracts, all of the data in those contracts and helps you automate the workflow around those contracts,” he said. This can include editing, approvals, electronic signatures, etc.
Generative AI plays a role here as well, allowing users to query content in folders to better understand it or locate specific parts in a way that traditional enterprise search couldn't do. Summarization capabilities give users the essence of a large cache of content without having to read every line. In terms of workflow, AI's generative coding capabilities can help in automatically creating customized workflows based on specific requirements.
It feels like the Bucs are entering a new phase, says William Blair analyst Jason Adair, who watches the Bucs. “Now I think we're seeing Box 3.0, where it's moving into the world of AI and workflow and really getting into the heart of a lot of vertical industry workflows,” Adair said. “It's tied into contracts and digital assets in obviously document-heavy types of industries where AI plays a huge role.” Because it can automate a lot of that work.”
In fact, the way customers view content is changing. They don't just want to manage it anymore, they want to run it in the same way that data platforms like Snowflake and Databricks have moved beyond simply managing data to building applications on top of it. Simply having content in repositories is no longer enough, and AI is driving efforts to automate workflows and deliver practical results for business productivity.
“Ultimately, companies want to leverage this content — not just store it — to drive automation and improve business outcomes,” said Alan Belz Sharp, founder and principal analyst at Deep Analysis. “So acquisitions like Crooze provide simpler tools than ever to develop those outcomes. Crooze is likely the most important acquisition Box has made to date.
The evolution of the content management industry
Box is not alone in this push, but as generative AI develops the ability to create content and query the content store, we are starting to see content management and knowledge management (business memory) merge together. Furthermore, the ability to generate code can allow businesses to quickly create customized workflows based on content requirements and types.
Cheryl MacKinnon, an analyst at Forrester who has been covering content management for two decades, says she sees the content management industry as a whole moving in the same direction as Box, and believes this is a natural evolution. “I see this as just going up the maturity curve, and this shift toward workflow and AI is definitely where the market is moving,” MacKinnon said. “This is kind of the tipping point where now it's not just about storing files and folders, but can we put these things to work? Can we think about content, not just from a storage standpoint, but across the context of the entire business?”
This is a big moment for the entire industry, Bills-Sharp says. “The ECM sector as a whole (including Box) now has the largest window of opportunity available to them in 20 years, opened up by the interest and embrace of organizations large and small in leveraging AI,” he said.
He believes that ECM companies in particular are well placed to benefit from AI because it already ensures that unstructured data is accurate, relevant, secure and timely. This is an important piece that AI models need and are often missing, he said. But the question is: Can Box and these other companies implement this moment and capitalize on it?
“It is important to note that while this window of opportunity is real, there is no guarantee that ECM companies will focus on embracing it,” Bales-Sharp said. “Companies like Salesforce, for example, recognize the importance of managing unstructured data, as does Oracle [and other industry giants]”.
“The advantage that Box and others like it currently have is that they have dedicated platforms to do this work and, more importantly, deep skill sets and experience that they can bring to the table.”
