Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Cynthia Hiponia, Vice President of Box Investor Relations, and welcome to BoxWorks' 2024 Investor Product Briefing. Since our comprehensive product strategy briefing that we provided at our Financial Analyst Day in March, our product leadership and pace of innovation has continued. I'm sure you've seen our press release today regarding our new product announcements. Today, we're excited to have our CEO and co-founder, Aaron Levie, our Chief Product Officer, Diego Dugatkin, our CTO, Ben Kuss, our Vice President, Product Strategy, Rand Wacker, and our Chief Operating Officer, Olivia Nottebohm. The leadership team will provide an overview of today's exciting news and do a deeper dive on our intelligent content management strategy. We will then have a live Q&A session at the end of the presentation. Feel free to send questions to ir@box.com or enter them into the text chat box.
This presentation will not be providing any financial updates, nor will we be able to address any financial questions during the Q&A portion. Please note that this presentation may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. Further information on these risk factors that could affect our forward-looking statements we make in this presentation can be found in the documents that we filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. With that, I'll turn the session over to Aaron Levie, Box co-founder and CEO. Aaron?
Hello. I'm Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box, and welcome to our BoxWorks investor briefing. Now, first, I'd invite you to definitely check out the full BoxWorks keynote from earlier today. We have an incredible amount of content and product announcements that we shared, but we wanted to have an investor briefing that really provided the condensed set of announcements and the major updates that we've made. We are rolling out some incredible new product functionality in both Q4 and going into early next year that we wanted to share with our customers, investors, and partners. At Box, we have over 115,000 customers, everything from major industry disruptors like Airbnb or Spotify to giants like GE, all the way to major federal agencies and government institutions like NASA or the Department of Defense and any organization in between.
We serve every critical industry, and we are rapidly growing in markets like financial services, the public sector, life sciences, and more, and what's amazing and what keeps us incredibly passionate about what we're building is that we're entering an all-new era of work. Every single thing about how we work in the future is going to become fundamentally different. It starts, of course, first with the biggest trend of all, and that is that AI is entering the workforce. This is changing everything about how we as individuals are going to remain productive and how organizations can maximize the productivity of their company. It means that we're going to be driven by data-oriented insights in everything that we do. We can make decisions faster, with better insights that are more intelligent right when we need them. We also are driving much more modern digital-first experiences.
This is true both for how companies serve their customers as well as how we work internally with modern technology. We also need to collaborate beyond our organization and across institutions with partners and vendors and clients. And so we need streamlined ways of doing this. And of course, all of this has to happen while securing the flow of data. It's no longer enough to just put all of your data in a data center, lock up the data center, and imagine that you're secure. We have to protect information as it moves around applications and systems. And when we think about these mega trends that are really shaping how we work, content is at the center of how we work. Content is the lifeblood of our businesses.
It's how we produce new products, how we market to customers, how we enable new employees to learn everything about our businesses. It's how we hire and onboard and train them. It's how we close deals with customers and how we close the books at the end of a quarter. Content flows throughout our organization and helps us make the best decisions and produces the ultimate products that we're building or services that we deliver to our customers. The challenge, of course, is that today most enterprises are not getting the most amount of value from their content. And when you look at enterprise information, what's amazing to us is that about 10% of enterprise data is structured data. You can query this data, you can ask it questions, you can summarize it. This is the data that lives in our CRM systems or our ERP systems or our databases.
But you've really never been able to do that with our unstructured data or our enterprise content. So we believe that there's a tremendous amount of untapped value for enterprises to tap into once they can understand what is inside of all that information. And so AI fundamentally transforms the value of enterprise content. For the first time ever, with generative AI technology, we can do things like ask all of our data questions to get instant insights about any amount of information. We can begin to automate our workflows because we can extract the most important structured data from our unstructured content. Once you have that structured data, that allows you to automate your business. And then finally, once we can understand what's inside of our content, we can better protect that content and secure it throughout the entire lifecycle.
But the challenge is that the way that most enterprises manage their content today is fundamentally broken. They're dealing with a tremendously fragmented landscape of legacy technology, document management systems, storage infrastructure, collaboration tools, point solutions for e-signature or workflow automation. And each of these silos means that end users have a very unproductive experience getting access to the information they need. It's very hard to secure this data because you have different user permissions and different security paradigms across these platforms. It's extremely costly because you've redundantly stored your content many times over. And now the challenge gets even worse because with each of these applications, you have a siloed approach to AI. So you're not able to get the real value of all of your enterprise content by having a consolidated platform that lets you tap into the value of this information.
So enterprises need a better way, and the future is intelligent content management. At Box, we are building the leading intelligent content management platform that powers the entire lifecycle of content from the moment it gets created to how you protect it, to how companies can enrich that content by extracting structured data, to be able to collaborate on that content in and outside of an enterprise, automate workflows given that you now have structured data, the ability to get unlimited e-signatures to work with any of their partners or clients, the ability to publish content to internal teams or externally, the ability to analyze all the interactions on content and then retain that content at the end of a lifecycle.
And then taking that even further, we have an open platform that lets companies take their most important enterprise content and connect it up to any application, whether it be applications they built with our APIs or third-party applications like Microsoft Teams, ServiceNow, Zoom, Slack, Salesforce, IBM's technology, Webex, and many other major platforms. And that's not all. We decided to bake in the power of AI directly into the core of our platform. We don't treat AI as a standalone separate product, but instead a fundamental engine that makes all of our functionality more intelligent. And when you combine these capabilities that we've been building and the ones you'll see shortly from Diego and team that we'll be releasing in Q4 and beyond, this is having a dramatic impact on our ability to expand the market opportunity for Box.
With intelligent content management, we have gone from basic and secure file sharing and storage when we founded the company to being able to help companies manage and secure their content at scale across their entire organization to now being able to fundamentally power workflow automation and intelligence with an enterprise's most important content. The impact of this is that we can expand to more use cases in an enterprise, to more lines of business, to companies of all sizes for use cases that they were never using us before, and this means that our total addressable market is going to expand meaningfully because we can consolidate more solutions into the Box platform, enabling customers to have a single platform to power their entire intelligent content management lifecycle.
What you're going to see from us is not only an incredible amount of new innovation, but also ways that we'll be bringing this innovation to market. And Olivia will explain how we've packaged up these new features in a new Enterprise Advanced plan that lets us expand our footprint within customers even further. The future of work starts today. We are unbelievably excited about the roadmap ahead, and we're excited to share what that looks like with you today. With that, I'm going to bring up Diego, our Chief Product Officer, to share a bit more.
Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us. I'm Diego Dugatkin, Chief Product Officer at Box. I am very excited to be here today to share our product vision, especially around AI and intelligent content management. At Box, our mission has always been to power how the world works together. That is so exciting because this ability to turn content to decisive impact at scale has been very, very hard to access for companies so far. To understand why, we can think about the limitations of the content management systems and processes that customers have turned to. They have to contend with fragmentation, rigidity, and security challenges. It's hard to lock down their content. It's even harder to put it in motion and make it accessible in the ways they need for impact. They are living in challenge and complexity.
This is why intelligent content management truly is something new and different with starkly different possibilities and outcomes. We take customers out of that world of challenge and complexity, rigidity, and disconnection, and we do it through a state-of-the-art, secure, cloud-native platform that is profoundly adapted and aligned to the needs of modern businesses. This is an absolute game changer. Only Box can take you there. Box is built on a foundation of a truly global and scalable platform. We're still the only ones providing unlimited storage. We have become the most trusted content management solution by focusing deeply on security and compliance. We take an uncompromising approach to keep your data safe. We encompass control, visibility, and governance. To be able to navigate compliance challenges, you need tight control over who gets access to what content on what terms.
We have also evolved into a place where you can act on the content. Content needs to be put into motion, to be turned into experiences and workflows, and exposed to users and customers in just the right way, and at that very heart of intelligent content management is our unique approach to AI. Unlike others who try to crowd our AI into their solution or have it as something essentially standalone, Box AI is deeply integrated and connected into our whole platform. It means administrators can configure and shape the way their teams use AI to fit their own needs and strategy, and technical leaders and architects can feel confident that they are accessing the best innovation and capabilities without losing control. In each one of these areas, we continually invest and innovate.
We continue to add our infrastructure with large files, billion-file folders now, accelerated upload and download speeds, expanded Box Zones, and more. For security and compliance, we've added extensive ransomware protection, threat detection, and expanded data residency. For collaboration and workflows, with our new publishing solution for curated content in portals with Box Hubs, the new metadata extraction, Box Sign, Box Forms, Box Doc Gen, there are a number of ways to extend what you can do with content in Box. And of course, for AI, Box AI as a platform is built on principles of full control, security, and privacy, always with full transparency, being also model agnostic with multi-doc queries, secure RAG, and unlimited end-user AI calls.
And we always do it for all modalities, focusing on web, mobile, and desktop, but also through our platform, always expanding our more than 1,500 integrations with every key player in the ecosystem. That empowers our customers to truly pick the solutions they want for their tech stack. And focusing on developer experiences and the developer tools with updated APIs, our new developer site and community, we even make it easy for customers to build their own integrations. But we're just getting started. The last few years have been incredibly productive as we have focused on building intelligence and automation into our platform. These are all steps that make intelligent content management possible, and this is a vision we will keep building. We have so much innovation at BoxWorks 2024, the biggest year yet for Box as we lead ICM.
Next, you're going to hear from the team on developments in a number of areas. To get us started, next I'm going to invite our CTO, Ben Kuss, to share how we're using AI to drive our intelligent content experiences. Thank you.
Thanks, Diego. I'm Ben Kuss, Chief Technology Officer at Box, and as Aaron said, we believe the advancements of AI models directly translate to value for the enterprises, and nowhere do we see this more than with their unstructured content. At Box, we're focused on three key areas with AI. The first is supercharging productivity of users. The second is allowing enterprises to tailor the AI to get the most value, and the third is increasing enterprise efficiency with advanced workflows powered by AI. Let's start by looking at some Box AI-powered productivity features. We recently released Box Hubs, which allows our customers to curate and publish content. Our customers are using Hubs across multiple parts of their business, including sales, HR, marketing, onboarding, and more, and with the power of AI and Hubs, users can find information and business insights instantly in ways that were never before possible.
To illustrate this, here's an example hub that one of our customers who does risk consulting uses for their clients. By using hubs as a source of information for their critical audits, they can securely collect and share critical and detailed information across their consulting teams and their clients. And with the power of AI, any question about the project can be answered instantly as the AI can read and understand the data in real time using retrieval augmented generation. This allows the customers to use AI to be able to extract insights and increase productivity across their most complex and proprietary data. And we've incorporated this AI across all content in Box so it's available where the customer works, including directly into their viewing experience so an AI agent is always one click away to assist the user in understanding and drawing insights across their content.
These capabilities work not only for text-based documents, but we've also incorporated the multimodal capabilities of the latest AI models into Box AI such that you can use Box AI across your images for your business needs. These capabilities will help you turbocharge productivity, but AI is even more powerful when it can be customized to the enterprise needs. This is why we're excited to announce Box AI Studio, which gives advanced AI customization capabilities. With AI Studio, enterprises can create their own AI agents that use custom personas and custom instructions that are tailored to the enterprise's needs. This allows customers to pick from a list of the most powerful AI models on the market and customize all aspects of the AI interaction. We let them test their agents in order to ease the AI development process.
When they're done, deploy the agents in a targeted way so that different parts of the business can take advantage of these customized AI agents. With built-in AI technologies like secure RAG and policies that protect enterprise data, we've integrated the trusted AI models into Box AI platform to empower and leverage AI across all business needs. In short, Box AI has the controls, Box AI understands the permissions, and Box AI doesn't train on any enterprise data. Finally, using the power of AI, we can increase enterprise efficiency. The Box AI platform was built not only to power Box applications, but also to integrate with AI assistance from other platforms and also to power custom development on top of the Box AI platform. Like everything at Box, we have created APIs, and so any customer can use our Box AI APIs to power custom AI capabilities.
We also have the ability to do AI-powered metadata extraction, which Rand will talk about shortly. And you'll continue to see innovations like AI-powered security classifications and more coming soon. We believe we are still at the beginning of how AI will transform work. And as we progress from AI assistants of the past to now customizable AI agents, and then to using these AI agents in more complex agentic workflows, we believe that AI will become an increasingly critical part of how all enterprises work. And although we're still early in the value of AI in the enterprise, I have three predictions. First is that the AI models will continue to evolve rapidly. Even though the AI models are very capable today, they have only a fraction of the capabilities that they'll have in the future.
The next is that AI agents are going to become a critical part of many different workflows inside of your organization. If in the past you had AI that could assist your employees, in the future you'll have a whole team of AI agents working with your users to do some of the most complex tasks in your enterprise. The third is that companies who are using AI today will be best placed to take advantage of these capabilities as they evolve across AI. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Rand to talk about workflow automation.
Hey everyone, I'm Rand Wacker, VP of Product Strategy here at Box. I'm really excited to be here today to talk to you about what we're doing in workflow and automating business processes with AI. So we've been focused for a while now on reinventing content-centric workflows for the modern workplace. This means helping people speed up what they're doing, working with their teams, and making sure business gets done faster. As Aaron talked about before, this is everything that runs your business. It's building and launching new products. It's taking those and marketing them to customers. It's being able to onboard and enable your employees. And it's being able to close deals and make sure that business keeps moving on. But the problem is that today, enterprises are facing a major challenge for how they're automating their workflows.
There's a lot of legacy tools, a lot of siloed systems, and they're not taking advantage of the information that is available in their content. We have legacy ECM systems that are outdated and they're not ready for AI. We have some teams that are deploying multiple tools that are creating sort of an IT nightmare with multiple workflow point products. And some people are trying to build a custom application from the ground up, which is expensive, difficult, and time-consuming. And then, as I said, all of that information, all of this critical data is locked in that unstructured content in your organization. So let's dive into each of these, starting on the ECM side. Many of these legacy players were designed decades ago, and they were built for an on-prem world and don't fit into a cloud IT stack.
They weren't designed for modern web and mobile experiences, and they definitely can't take advantage of today's innovations in AI. So there's a lot of opportunity to improve these systems with a better content management solution. Some people have started deploying point solutions for individual processes. And here you run into the silo problem that Aaron talked about earlier. You're going to have fragmented IT systems, data strewn in multiple places. It increases cost, it increases complexity, it decreases security, and it makes things confusing for everyone. And for people that try to build something from the ground up, there's so much that they have to do to create a content system with regards to permissions, searching, being able to share files, secure them, govern them, all these different pieces.
And so it's more important that they be able to actually build a system from the ground up as opposed to having to create everything from an API. And this information that's trapped in your content could help improve your business, can help speed things up, can help you find insights you didn't know about before, and improve how you're serving your customers. So at Box, we're building a next-gen platform for content workflow automation. And this is built on some capabilities we've had today, Box Relay and Box Sign. They've been around for workflow and e-signatures, and thousands of customers are using these every day. At this event, we're announcing Box Forms, Box Doc Gen, Box AI, and Box Apps. And I'm going to take you through each one of those. To power everything, metadata is really the fuel that unites all this together.
As you know, metadata is the information contained in a document that has important information about that document. Who is this contract with? What's the value? When does it renew? All this information actually needs to be saved outside the document as well, so it's easier for us to manage that in a process, to secure it, and to make sure everyone can get the right information that they need. In the past, though, it's been very tedious to extract this information from these files. You've either had to have humans doing it manually, or you've had automated systems that were very expensive. They didn't work well for unstructured data like contracts, and they weren't really responsive when things changed. So it was only applied to highest volumes, most static pieces, and so all of this information is still locked within your files.
But now with AI, we can apply structure to unstructured data at scale. And we're really excited to be talking about Box AI for metadata. This allows you to enrich your content and the processes with that metadata and extract everything automatically using the Box AI platform. So here you see a contract, a non-disclosure agreement. And Box AI has automatically extracted the type of document it is, the version, who participates in it, everything that's important. And you can have dozens of these fields. Box AI will automatically extract them, make it very easy for a human to verify what's supposed to be there. This information can then be used to make decisions in the business process. For example, you can determine what's expiring soon and what needs to be renewed. You can make a determination about how to route something for approvals or for certain workflows.
And you can ensure that expired information has been removed from the system and doesn't show up and cause some confusion. So all of this is part of the business engine that runs on content. And that can really only proceed as fast as your workflow tools can move. So we're announcing a new capability called Box Forms. This allows you to create form-driven business processes and kick things off with an easy builder where you can collect information, metadata, upload files, and really start off a whole process that would go into a workflow using Box Relay. We're also excited to talk about Box Doc Gen. This is something where you can take information from a workflow and then plug that into a template to create a document automatically.
These documents can then be edited, sent to customers, or simply used as the basis for the next part of the process. And this is, of course, integrated into our Salesforce integration, which allows you to kick off multiple pieces of your customer relationship. And so we're building these content-centric business applications. But imagine if you could actually spin that up really quickly instead of taking weeks. Imagine if these were built by the process owners as opposed to being built by IT or developers. And imagine if you can use the best AI technologies to improve all these. So the most exciting thing we're talking about today is Box Apps. This is a no-code app builder that lets you build tools to run your teams and your business with all of your content. Box Apps brings together your content, your metadata, your workflows, and your users.
It allows you to create dashboards and views and custom applications that bring teams together for what they need to do day to day. This is an example of a contracts dashboard. It allows a legal team to coordinate amongst multiple people all the different phases for contracts that are new, reviewed, and then stored. Box Apps fits between the traditional Box Web, mobile, and desktop capabilities, and then our APIs available on the Box platform. And it allows you to create applications very quickly with your business teams without having to have any custom coding or anything like that. And with this, we can power more and different business processes in the enterprise. For sales, for example, you can use this to organize all of the assets and let people find what they need to serve their customers quicker. You can manage the contracts like we showed before.
In marketing, you can organize all of your digital assets. You can create easy new content based on all the right criteria for each of the different elements. You can manage the engagements where every piece of content is going through a review and approval process. The operations team can use it for managing facilities, leases, maintenance schedules, everything that needs to be tracked and recorded and retained. You can even build process manuals for manufacturing, making sure that all of your standard operating procedures are reviewed, approved, and tracked for the right version. And HR teams can use this to update their policies, can use this to onboard employees, and to manage all their records long-term. So we're really excited to bring all this together. Box Forms, Doc Gen, Box AI, and Box Apps, complementing Box Sign and Box Relay for a full business process portfolio.
Thanks very much for listening today. Right now, I'd like to hand it over to Olivia Nottebohm, our Chief Operating Officer, who's going to close this out.
Thank you, Rand. Good afternoon. I am Olivia Nottebohm, Chief Operating Officer at Box. I've been at Box for a year now, and it's been incredibly exciting to see and help our organization and our customers move into the future of work. As you heard from our team, intelligent content management is paving the way for our customers to get unprecedented value out of their unstructured data. When I last spoke with you at our financial analyst day in March, I reviewed our go-to-market strategy for FY 2025, focusing on how we will be delivering high-value solutions through our suites and platform, complemented by partners. We have remained focused on our four go-to-market pillars. First, expand and monetize new categories. We are engaging our customers and prospects on advanced content management capabilities to disrupt the traditional legacy enterprise content management space with our solutions.
Second, we are building out our platform business. With our product announcements today, we are bringing even more functionality to our customers through our platform. This will also serve as a way to capture and partner more deeply with SIs. Third, we are growing our ecosystem to expand our reach to more customers and prospects. We are investing in partners, specifically focusing on system integrators and ISVs. In fact, earlier today at BoxWorks, I invited Slalom on stage during the keynote. Slalom is a global professional services firm we're working with to help customers drive digital transformation. Other partners on stage included OpenAI, Salesforce, Anthropic, and more, and finally, we are investing in awareness and consideration. We continue to educate the market about this next chapter for Box.
We see the momentum and the positive reception from customers around our new intelligent content management capabilities, and we will continue to spread the word. Since we launched our first suites in 2019, we have continuously increased the value to our customers by bringing them the full power of the Content Cloud, first in traditional file sharing and storage, then in managing and securing content, and now as we move into workflow automation and intelligence. We are excited to deliver even more value to our Enterprise Plus, our core suites offering to the enterprise. We recently delivered Hubs, an easy-to-use content portal that allows you to curate, organize, view, and share content both internally and externally. We also announced unlimited end-user queries for Box AI. This is for notes, documents, and hubs, making it even easier for users to get high-impact intelligence across their enterprise.
At Box, we believe that intelligent content management will pave the way for enterprises to unlock the greatest value from their content while still being secure and controlled. Through our product innovations, we can address many complex enterprise use cases around ECM, document workflows, security, and governance. As we deliver on these product innovations, we have created a higher-tier enterprise plan for customers to access these new capabilities. I'm excited to share that we are bringing a new plan, Enterprise Advanced, to our customers. This new plan will enable companies to power intelligent content workflows across their business. It includes AI-powered metadata extraction at scale, unlimited workflow dashboards through Box Apps, an ability to create custom agents through Box AI Studio, higher API allowances, and more, all available in one simple plan.
Imagine being able to empower any team in your business, from marketing to sales to legal to engineering to product and beyond, with their own customized apps to manage their most critical content workflows. Plus, at scale, metadata extraction to work more quickly and powerful archival tools to secure and keep data compliant. This plan will be available in January, and we are beginning demos now. We cannot wait to see what our customers will accomplish with all these new capabilities.
Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. If you wish to ask an audio question, please press the star one on your cell phone keypad to raise your hand and join the queue. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press the star one again. Once again, please press the star one to join the queue. And your first question comes from the line of Josh Baer with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Great. Thanks for the question. Just reflecting on the pace of innovation coming from Box and really the evolution of the platform and the addressable categories is quite remarkable. Everything seems to be coming at a faster pace, and we're seeing existing customers sort of progress through the suites. I'm wondering about what this means for new logos, wondering if you could talk about interest, demand, a change in conversations for potential customers, anything to note there on what all this innovation means for potentially new customers.
Yeah. Josh, just to build and kind of Enterprise Plus, this was really our plan for secure content management collaboration, driving really a productivity opportunity within the install base, but really a number of at-bats that lets us go after new customers where maybe the pure productivity story for collaboration and content management is not resonating as well. Things like contract management or digital asset management or client onboarding or other automated workflows lets us actually get into their organization in a more seamless way. So this functionality, I think, opens up so many more doors for us, which is great to see.
Great. Thank you. I have a question that's been from Cindy, and it's, "All the new capabilities seem to mostly be wrapped into Enterprise Advanced here. Is this the right way to think about the product roadmap priorities going forward?
From a strategy standpoint, as we've talked about to investors and analysts, we are really focused on having a set of sequential plan tiers that offer more and more value per tier. Again, if you kind of think about the general eras of the company, we started with secure collaboration, then we extended into secure content management collaboration at scale. Now we're entering really kind of a new chapter of workflow automation and intelligence. You have the opportunity for another one of those plan tiers to introduce the most powerful functionality that lets our customers really start to drive automation and workflows in their enterprise. Over the past couple of years, we've been working in the background to align the next set of functionality we deliver to a new plan tier.
There's been dozens of teams hard at work at Box to make sure that we can kind of line this up. That has landed with the Enterprise Advanced plan. We would anticipate still further directions we can go beyond, but obviously, this is our focus right now. We will still add more value to Enterprise Plus and other plans over time when it makes sense, if there's kind of core collaboration or productivity enhancements or core security features. Certainly, for this advanced automation workflow and content management functionality, Enterprise Advanced is what we're going to be targeting.
Sure. And to build on that, what we talked about last time was this evolution from more of a seats-oriented model to a seats-plus consumption. Obviously, we have some consumption today. But with the Enterprise Advanced plan, it really lays the foundation for enterprises to be building out these workflows for which we believe they will need additional consumption. So you heard discussion of AI API calls, DocGen API, a number of these API options that we believe our customers will draw on and drive more of that consumption. Obviously, there's an allotment in this plan itself. But as we see those spiky user profiles, we expect to monetize that way as well.
Thanks, Olivia. A follow-up question is, "Any color on the pricing around Enterprise Advanced relative to Enterprise Plus?
Yeah.
So I mean, we won't be talking about pricing today. It'll be GA in a couple of months.
Yeah. And I would just signal that you've seen our history of adding new plans and kind of the general relative price increase. But yeah, we'll be talking about pricing later.
Great. Aaron, is there a way to think about how a customer might use AI Studio, just trying to understand the use cases that it might enable customers to do? And then how does Box play a role in the more agentic workflows?
Yeah. So maybe just the quick TL;DR, and then I'll hand it over to Ben and Diego. So with AI Studio, we are really expanding this opportunity where customers can choose their own AI model and create really kind of custom agents, which have instructions and AI models attached to them, as well as capabilities within Box that those agents can leverage. So we're really just launching the foundation capabilities today to let customers go and customize how they interact with AI in the enterprise. And we see a ton of opportunity around what that can look like going forward. So maybe Ben and Diego, if you want to talk about some of the near-term and then long-term elements of that.
Yeah. One of the things that we heard from a lot of customers who had been playing with building their own solutions directly on OpenAI or directly on things like Anthropic and AWS and so on is that they didn't want to put in place all the infrastructure that would then they'd have to run themselves. But they did need a lot of customization that was available to them so they could make it work the way that they had grown used to it from the core way that the agents work. So this is why we built AI Studio, so they could then get to the point of being able to customize it without having to then maintain the platform overall.
Then into the world of the agentic capabilities, one of the first steps you would do is to get these agents kind of working the way that you want to. Then you would have them start to be part of a process. For the future, for us, we'll be able to have them be operating a little bit more autonomously. Today, there's a lot of you have to prompt them the ways to do the work that you want. Then in the future, we'll be enhancing that.
Maybe one last thing to add. Our goal is to empower our customers and partners to choose what they do. And in this case, they can choose the LLMs. They can choose the agents the same way they can choose their own tech stack. And everything integrates into Box. Basically, AI Studio allows you to have that control and select which ones you use. Excuse me, it's empowerment and flexibility that we want to do and give to somewhat future-proof the implementation so innovation can be expanded while we're not increasing risk and giving the flexibility to choose to the customer and their implementation.
Thank you. In adding more workflow capabilities, recovery, archiving, security, help us think about how this changes your competitive set and where the boundaries for partnership with existing players versus competition?
Yeah. So the question was, how does it change competitive set with all these new features? We tend to think about our general category expansion less as how do we go compete in new markets and more how do we fold in more use cases into Box. If your content's already in the platform, we want to make it very easy to solve the complete lifecycle of your content within a single platform. So if you have a ransomware attack, you should not have to go off-platform to go and recover the data from that ransomware attack.
If you have a large amount of data that is maybe touched less frequently, maybe it's FINRA compliance-driven documents in financial services or a lot of healthcare data, we don't want you to have to move that content off of Box to an archival system just because you want that outside of the kind of end-user interface and end-user collaboration functionality. And so this is really about powering the complete lifecycle of content, delivering that in a single architecture, making it even easier for customers to bring in more of their data into Box, power those workflows, drive automation, get more value from their content as opposed to having to leave our platform.
We, again, based on our kind of platform emphasis, these capabilities, once they slot into Box, they instantly become available for all the data in the platform, of course, if the customer has the plan that's oriented toward that. Unlike traditional players in this space, where if there's a new capability, you have to kind of go to a price sheet and figure out which products is that going to work with because you have single-tenant instances in fragmented environments, and the Box multi-tenant cloud-based architecture means we build a new capability, and it becomes available to all of your data instantaneously. That's another advantage that we have within the platform.
Thanks, Aaron. I have a follow-up from Josh Baer, Morgan Stanley. A lot of Box users may use Office 365, a collaborative work management tool, and a list of other horizontal and vertical platforms, point solutions that touch on content or contracts, all of which have AI agents and AI capabilities. Are there multiple winners as it relates to vendors customers will go for for AI solutions? How does this play out, assuming limited budgets and the ability to use AI from all vendors? How is Box positioned to win? And which industries or use cases are most compelling for Box? Quite a mouthful.
Yeah. That's about seven questions, Josh. So we'll try and, Cynthia, keep us honest if we don't answer some of them. Maybe I'll give a high level. And then Diego and Ben again, if you want to look at the kind of future of agents and the architectures there. I think we have to think about agents and AI generally as de facto how software is going to work in the future. And so it would be kind of like saying, are we only going to have one mobile solution for enterprise software? No. You're going to have a mobile version of your HR system, a mobile version of your CRM system, a mobile version of your content management system.
I think AI is going to be similar, which is AI needs to manifest in software in a way that is sort of relevant and tailored to that particular set of functionality within that technology. For Box, AI manifests in Box to make content management more intelligent, content automation, being able to get insights from data, being able to better secure information. We will then link up with the AI from other platforms. If you, in the future, want to be able to ask Copilot from Microsoft a question, data will get fed in from Box as well to produce that answer. Similarly, if you're in ChatGPT or Claude, we would expect the exact same kind of scenario. We want to work wherever our customers are working from. If they're using AI assistants or AI applications elsewhere, we want to plug into those.
And then conversely, we want to make sure that there's AI embedded into our product capabilities to make our functionality more intelligent. So I don't think this is a winner-take-all space. It's absolutely not zero-sum. I think you're going to see growth of categories as a result of AI. And our job is to be the world's best player for content AI and go deeper than anybody else on delivering those capabilities. So, Ben and Diego.
One quick addition on this. The best agent for some functions may not come from the same place where the productivity tools come. So you may want to mix and match. And in order to do that, you need to have that neutral platform that we are presenting that would connect with Microsoft and would connect with Google and would connect with Salesforce and would connect with everybody else that brings both agents and tools that you need in the enterprise. That's why, to Aaron's point, there is no winner-takes-all. But also, you don't want to be attached to only one option because for your use cases, you may need to have more than one that actually solve it best. And for that, you need to have a Content Cloud that actually allows you to work with all of them at once.
Yeah. And then I'll add in from the agent side from the platforms. So I think, as we announced previously with Salesforce, and they were on stage today at the keynote, we're finding that we're specializing our agents to take the best use of our platform. So we, as a content cloud, we are focusing our efforts on making our agents very good about understanding unstructured content, being able to gather insights, doing everything that you need across the board for content. And then when we work with somebody like Salesforce, they focus on the kind of structured data in the world of their application.
We're starting to see that from other partners where we are all working to have our agents working together so that you could pick the best of what you need from your trusted platforms as opposed to one sort of centralized agent that would need to find a way to sort of be the best of all these. Because the agents take a lot of work to sort of specialize, we don't really see that happening.
So any concerns about agent sprawl? What's the follow-up?
My take on it is not concerned. Agents are very good at kind of performing different tasks for you and then we're all building the management capabilities across the board, so I would think that this is something that, once you define a few agents that are the ones that are extra good for your environment for the things that you want, you can then reuse those in multiple ways, so I think you won't have that problem, at least not for a while.
Sorry. I know that we're cheating by all answering multiple times. But I want to build on Diego's point about the neutrality and openness. And maybe, Olivia, if you've just to make this even more complicated, if you have any good anecdotes on this. I've been in dozens, if not hundreds, of customer conversations thus far where the customers want to be able to have their content in a position where the moment there's new innovation from a different AI provider, they want to be able to take advantage of that with their content. And so imagine you kind of have a choice of two types of architectures. You could have one architecture where your content is sort of stuck with the AI model. And there's sort of some set of players that are delivering that kind of architecture.
Then there's another approach, which is obviously what we're espousing, which is, what if I can have my content be separate from the AI, and I can have agents come in and do different use cases with different AI models powering those use cases? So I have maximum flexibility. I have maximum optionality. And I lose nothing in the process. And that's, I think, what we're resoundingly hearing from our customers, that that is a much more powerful way to architect their data management strategy going forward.
Right. And we hear from customers that, in many cases, they're already seeing some of these niche models, whether it's industry-specific or function-specific. And they are delighted by the idea of being able to choose the one they want. For example, I was in Japan a couple of months ago. They also wanted to be able to choose a local model. And so we really see a numerous set of times where the customer has decided that they probably will benefit from having a wide variety of selection rather than the one that just comes with whatever is the tool that's being used at the time.
Thank you. And Olivia, you discussed a key part of your go-to-market strategy as partnering more deeply with SIs. Can you give us an update here on how partners are responding to the internet content sorry, Intelligent Content Management strategy?
Yes. We are really excited to see the response from our system integrator partners. And we've applied a different lens to our go-to-market with them, specifically around thinking different parts of their practices, right? So some of our SI partners have a digital transformation partner practice. And that's where we're leaning in with them. Some of them have an ECM practice, right? And as I mentioned earlier, we see customers actually replacing legacy ECM tools with the Box solution. And then some of them have kind of ISV practices, like Salesforce and others, right? And so that's another entry point. And so we see tremendous success now in this momentum that's being built with partners.
We're very focused on making sure we hand-select a couple of key partners by geo and make sure that they are going to be successful and they are able to make a fantastic business with Box, and we're really excited to see the early signs of that.
Thank you. Can you touch a little bit on the public sector, federal in particular, and kind of what are the use cases for AI and ICM that you're hearing from these customers?
Yeah. Maybe Olivia or Aaron. Sure. Happy to talk about this. So obviously, public sector, and we look at both federal as well as state and local as a key area here. They have a number of areas where a huge amount of data. They need to get a handle on organization. And in fact, a lot of these organizations, especially at the federal level, have been big fans of using metadata for a long time for organizing this information. And so with the advent of AI and the ability to better extract that, we'll be able to serve them better and accelerate what they're doing overall.
On the state and local side, what we're seeing is by bringing not just the AI pieces, but also apps and our other workflow pieces, it actually helps enable them to create some more ways to better serve their constituents that they haven't had before. In the past, there's been a lot of concerns over the expense and the complexity of putting some of these systems together, and we're seeing a lot of interest in using Box as a place to better interact with the people out in the public overall.
We're also excited that we're in the process for FedRAMP High. That's something we're very proud of because we know the functionality will have an immense impact there.
Definitely.
Great. Well, that's all we have for questions today. And I'll turn it back to Aaron for some closing remarks.
Yeah. Just the only other thing I want to emphasize, and maybe if I can cheat and have Rand answer a question on my end, and then we'll close things up because I appreciate all the questions. Would love to build on the no-code kind of application side. One thing that we've seen from customers over the past decade plus is so many customers come to us and say, I want to be able to do contract management on Box. I want to do digital asset management on Box. I want to do invoice processing on Box. I want to do loan origination on Box. I want to do a client wealth portal on Box. And for good reason. There's plenty of ways to build those applications using our APIs. But not everybody has those resources. Not everybody has that time and energy.
And so unfortunately, we lose people along the way to delivering those use cases. And so we made this decision with the Crooze acquisition, as Olivia had mentioned, to say, we're going to go big on no-code applications built directly in Box to power all of these use cases. And there's literally thousands of potential use cases. So we'd love maybe a minute or two just on what that could look like. And then we'll close it up.
Absolutely. Well, customers are asking us to be able to do this on Box because their data is already there. Their users are already there. And they love using it. And we've heard for a long time that they want to be able to tackle not just the really well-defined business problems like the contracts and a lot of their core business pieces, but there's also a lot of existing processes for teams which have not been automated. And they haven't really had a set of tools that make that easy, either the legacy ECM systems are too expensive and complicated, or they don't want a whole bunch of point solutions running around.
We've been looking for a long time for a way to give people a platform where they could actually bring their content, their users, the metadata, and all their workflows together and put these pieces in place. The thing that's really unique about now also is this evolution of AI allows you to much more easily take advantage of that metadata and to speed up a lot of these processes. With apps and what we're doing with the no-code side of things, we're now able to give customers the ability to take all that data, get the information out, organize it, and then give their teams a place to go and do their work day to day in a much more structured way than they've been able to in the past.
Yeah. So I would just underscore this is unquestionably not only the biggest set of announcements we've ever had as a company in terms of just how much we've packed into BoxWorks today, especially with the addition of Enterprise Advanced. But the Box Apps very specifically, I think, opens up a completely new set of opportunities for us that will let us expand into new lines of business, new segments, new size of companies, new geographies, new industries. And so you're going to see a lot of potential as this continues to get more and more robust and we expand this functionality. So we're incredibly excited about the future of intelligent content management. We really appreciate the time for all of investors tuning in and learning more about the strategy. And we look forward to keeping everybody updated. So thank you. See you soon.