For years, companies have been looking for better ways to share content, but the file/folder metaphor has stubbornly stuck. And that worked well for ad hoc types of sharing between individuals or small groups, but for larger teams, it could be difficult to understand content found in folders without context. Enter Box Hubs, a new tool for creating a centralized microsite for sharing specialized types of content. It was announced today at the BoxWorks customer conference.
The company’s CEO and co-founder, Aaron Levie, says this problem has been something the company has thought about solving for a decade, but it really came to a head during lockdown, when sharing content became imperative. Today, with the arrival of generative ai, these types of content portals become even more useful.
“So Box Hubs is basically the ability to curate content from your Box account and then publish it to whatever audience you want, but in a personalized, curated way within your business and the use cases are effectively endless,” Levie told TechCrunch. .
This takes the form of a specialized portal designed to contain things like human resources policies, brand assets, or the latest pricing information for a sales team. Each of these scenarios would lose something in the translation of files and folders, but their purpose would be clear in a portal like this:
Image credits: Box
Where does ai come into play here? The core format provides a highly curated set of information to search, something Levie admits they hadn’t considered until ChatGPT emerged last year.
“One of the biggest problems with ai is that it is actually very difficult to run an ai query across a large set of unstructured data for every topic in your business. The challenge is that you will often get hallucinations or a wrong answer from the ai because it simply has too many different sources of information where it can answer the question,” he said.
Box realized that applying generative ai to search a single content repository like Box Hub would actually result in much more accurate answers and would work well with a generative ai search approach. “What we come to, frankly by coincidence, is that once you’ve curated your data into a (specific content portal) and users ask a question within that context, you actually get much better answers and a much higher likelihood of find the correct answer. type of response.”
The company provides a tool for creating portals, and Levie says creating them is quite simple. “Basically, you just add a new hub, give it a header, give it a title, give it an icon, fill it with content, hit publish, and that’s it,” he said.
It will be up to customers to ensure that portals are up to date and outdated ones are removed. Levie says who is responsible for creating and maintaining hubs is something customers will have to work out, but he says it would typically be a department or team leader, or a power user who would take on these responsibilities.
Box Hubs will be free with Enterprise plans and above, but Box Hubs with ai Search will be a separate component available only with the Enterprise Plus plan.
It’s important to note that while both products were announced today, they won’t be available in beta until next year.
