By Jeffrey Dastin and Max A. Cherney
NEW YORK/SAN FRANCISCO, April 27 (Reuters) – Box is launching a service built for artificial intelligence to expedite tedious work, like processing millions of invoices and pulling data from corporate documents, CEO Aaron Levie told Reuters on Monday.
In an interview at Reuters’ Momentum AI summit in New York, Levie said the company would launch the service, called Box Automate, on Tuesday. It builds on other AI programs that Box developed to put enterprises’ vast and disorganized data to use.
Box Automate lets a customer specify how AI agents – programs that perform tasks with minimal direction – can plug in to business processes like invoice management. The software can have an AI agent handle grunt work, pull crucial data from “every one of those invoices,” and set up a quick decision for an employee to review, Levie said.
The software will come with most of Box’s enterprise product plans, he said. It also has the potential to upsell to Box’s Enterprise Advanced tier, which lets customers build agents powering this automation.
“We are trying to balance how to make this as available as possible,” with “definitely trying to make more money,” Levie said.
BOX PUSHES FORWARD ON AI
Box, which Levie co-founded more than two decades ago while in college, has lately been remaking its cloud services to revolve around AI in order to win business and stave off disruption.
The Redwood City, California-based company is navigating a crowded marketplace for cloud computing, with a focus on business customers and on making AI from other developers, including Anthropic and OpenAI, achieve better results with their Box-stored content.
It has faced some market skepticism. Box’s shares are down more than 16% so far this year as investors expected various software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers to be swept away by the enterprise drive of Anthropic in particular.
Levie is unfazed. In his view, most companies would not waste their scarce resources aiming to replicate what SaaS providers built over years, or ask the likes of ChatGPT to do so, in a practice called vibe coding.
“You’re not going to vibe-code an ERP system,” Levie said. “I don’t think you’re going to vibe-code a CRM system. The risk is simply too high.”
(Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Francisco and Jeffrey Dastin in New York; Editing by Kenneth Li and Matthew Lewis)
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