Connections

Box is seeing a positive initial response to its new Box AI suite of capabilities, Aaron Levie, Box CEO, said Aug. 29, during the company’s earnings call with analysts for its second quarter (ended July 31).

Box AI, introduced in May, natively integrates advanced artificial intelligence (AI) models into the Box Content Cloud, bringing Box’s enterprise-grade standards for security, compliance and privacy, the company said at the time. Box AI makes it easier than ever to uncover and share insights, find timely answers to critical questions, and effortlessly create content based on an organization’s data in Box, it said then.

“With Box AI, we’re bringing intelligence to enterprise content,” Levie said during the Q2 call. “We’ve seen an incredible response to Box AI in the first couple of months since our announcement. We know that AI is going to transform how enterprises work with their data and organizations are going to need a secure way to connect their most important data to leading AI models. And, with Box AI, we’re building the leading platform-neutral approach to connecting enterprise content to AI, starting with OpenAI’s leading large language models.”

During the company’s “early customer conversations, including in our design partner program, we are hearing valuable feedback on use cases from customers that are looking to automatically extract metadata from their documents to drive workflows, ask questions of large sets of documents to find things no human would be able to answer or intelligently protect their content with more advanced data classification,” according to Levie.

“This is just the start of what’s possible,” he noted. “Our customers are excited about the new possibilities for productivity and insight they will gain from using Box AI with their content.”

Box will share “even more news at BoxWorks around how we’re advancing Box AI and bringing it into the hands of even more customers,” he said, noting his company’s annual conference will held October. The company plans to “share updates from across the entire product platform to our customers and lay out our vision for the future of work with AI” there, he added.

Meanwhile, over the past few months, Levie said he spoke with customers “across nearly every sized business, geography and industry. While customers are still facing various macro pressures that impact IT spend and see growth in the near term, Box is still being prioritized in the areas where our unique value proposition is aligned with the IT decisions they are making in the near and long term around digital imperatives and the role of AI.”

During his conversations with CIOs, he said, it was “clear that they’re looking to advance their digital strategies to help drive growth in their business, improve productivity across their organization, leverage integrated platforms that can provide them more value and keep their enterprises secure from threats.”

He added: “At the same time, they have more content than ever before and are looking to leverage AI to accelerate their business processes and how they work.”

Box Q2 revenue grew 6% to $261.4 million, a 6% increase from $246.0 million in Q2 last year, the company said. Net income, meanwhile, swung to a $5.7 million profit (4 cents a share) from a $3.3 million loss (2 cents a share).