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Cloud content-management company Box has unveiled Box Hubs — AI-powered intelligent portals designed to make it easy to organise, curate and publish content with internal teams and external partners.
The announcement was made today at Box’s annual BoxWorks conference and comes five months after the company first revealed it would be integrating “advanced AI models” into its Box Content Cloud to help customers surface information and generate content.
According to a Box-sponsored IDC white paper, approximately 90% of data generated by organisations today – which includes all the content flowing through an enterprise in the form of spreadsheets, videos, documents, and more – is unstructured.
“As the amount of unstructured data continues to increase, organisations can no longer overlook the challenges created when the content is sprawled across silos and applications,” said Wayne Kurtzman, research vice president of collaboration and communities at IDC.
The no-code nature of Box Hubs allows users to create Hubs quickly, without the help of IT or admins, and customise them by changing the layout and adding header images, icons, and descriptive information.
Content from Box can be added to a Hub without the need to manually copy the files over, and organised into so-called content playlists, while all available Hubs can be accessed via the new Box Hubs gallery, eliminating the need to search through multiple folders.
Built-in insights at both the Hub and file level will allow customers to better understand the trends behind how their content is performing and how their audience is engaging with their Hubs, and a search functionality within specific Hubs surfaces the information they need faster.
Finally, through the use of Box AI, customers will be able to ask questions covering all of the content curated in a Hub to extract key information, summarise complex concepts, and compare specific files. Additionally, users will be able to generate new content based on information in a Hub, to ensure that creating new, relevant content is easy and seamless.
All content published in a Hub will be secured by Box’s enterprise-grade security, governance, and compliance capabilities, so that content is only ever available to its intended audience.
"Strategically, [Box Hubs] extends the functionality of Box, and equally important, core business integrations with intelligent content curation,” Kurtzman said. "The value that it provides to the user will continue increase as AI continues to improve. It is a good starting point effectively leveraging both integrations and core Box features.”
In addition to unveiling Box Hubs, the company also revealed that it would start rolling out the first two Box AI capabilities to Enterprise Plus plan users in beta this November. Using technology from OpenAI, the first capability provides users with the ability to create content in Box Note, while the second allows them to ask questions of specific documents when previewing them in Box.
Box Hubs will deeply integrate with Box AI so customers will be able to find answers to critical questions in seconds, automatically summarise vast amounts of information, and effortlessly create new content – all based on the documents users organise in a Hub.
Box Hubs will be available to all Box users on Enterprise plans and above. Box Hubs with Box AI will be included in the Enterprise Plus plan. Both versions of Box Hubs will be available in beta next year.
