Box releases Skills, which lets developers apply AI and machine learning to Box content

When you have as much data under management as Box does, you have the key ingredient for artificial intelligence and machine learning, which feeds on copious amounts of data. Box is giving developers access to this data, while letting them choose the AI and machine learning algorithms they want to use. Today, the company announced the general availability of the Box Skills SDK, originally announced at BoxWorks a year ago.

Jeetu Patel, Box’s chief product officer and chief strategy officer, says Beta customers have been focusing on use cases specific to each company. They have been pulling information from different classes of content that matter most to them to bring an element of automation to their content management. “If there’s a way to bring a level of automation with machine learning, rather than doing it manually, that would meaningfully change the way that business processes can function,” Patel told TechCrunch.

Among the use cases Box has been seeing with the 300 Beta testers, is using artificial intelligence to recognize the contents of a photo for the purpose of auto tagging, thereby eliminating the need for humans to do that tagging. Another example is in contract management where the terms are pulled automatically from the contract, saving the legal team from having to do this.

Where this can get really powerful though is that the Skill can drive a more complex automated workflow inside of Box. If, for example, the Skill is driving the creation of automated metadata, that can in turn drive a workflow, Patel said.

Box is providing the means to ingest Box data into a given AI or machine learning algorithm, but instead of trying to create those on its own, it’s been relying on partners who have more specific expertise such as IBM Watson, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Amazon Web Services. In fact, Box says it is working with dozens of AI and machine learning partners.

For customers who aren’t comfortable doing any of this on their own, Box is also providing a consulting service, where it can come into a customer and help work through a set of requirements and choose the best algorithm for the job.