IBM, Box Continue to Expand Strategic Partnership

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Enterprises today operate in a complex global environment where employees, customers and partners are often located across every corner of the world. At the same time, they are faced with managing an array of evolving global compliance, data protection, performance and security requirements. To help people achieve more at work amid this complexity, IBM and Box have been working together for the past three years to provide an easy way to securely store, access, edit and share business data as well as apply analytics, and now artificial intelligence to that data.

David Kenny, Senior Vice President, IBM Cognitive Solutions and Box Co-Founder and CEO, Aaron Levie.

The two companies have combined our strengths to help hundreds shared clients address increasing needs for productivity, security and insight-driven collaboration.

Last month, Box and IBM expanded our partnership to deliver the first ever custom skills built using the Box Skills Kit. IBM Watson, which is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the enterprise, is the first partner to leverage the Box Skills Kit to develop custom skills.

Today at BoxWorks, David Kenny joined Aaron Levie on stage to discuss new clients ATB Financial and H&R Block Canada, who are tapping into these landmark custom skills developed by IBM to improve their business processes:

• At ATB Financial, a Canadian Bank, loan officers spend hours manually combing through loan application forms –i.e. loans come with a variety of different factors like personal loans, mortgage loans, car loan applications. Today, employees are tasked to manually open the file to determine the form type, extracting information from the form such as loan number and client information, and route it to the next step in the process –i.e. jumbo mortgage forms are sent to underwriting or take other specific actions. With Watson, all that information is analyzed and extracted automatically to allow the loan form to become more searchable and consumable. Employees can then easily look for and find common scenarios or terms because everything is analyzed and tagged within seconds.

Companies interested in applying AI to their enterprise content can get started today with the following solutions:

• Custom image insights with Watson Visual Recognition: analyzes image data, enriching it with classifiers designed to make it easy to search and consume.
• Custom document insights with Watson Natural Language Understanding: automatically tags documents stored in Box with relevant concepts, entities, and keywords designed to help users quickly find what they need in dense documents like research papers, service manuals and legal documents.

In addition to applying Watson technologies to Box Skills, IBM will also build custom solutions that apply Watson AI to Box via the Box Platform APIs for other use cases. For example, IBM has built a document translation service that uses Watson’s Speech-to-Text capabilities to transcribe rich media uploaded to box into structured text transcriptions. This automated process significantly reduces the time it takes a person to create translated versions of documents and enables multinational organizations to more quickly share and collaborate across multiple languages and time zones.

In addition to all we are doing on the AI front, IBM and Box continue to combine the global reach of IBM Cloud with Box’s content management solutions to help companies tap into all of the benefits of the cloud while retaining the security, performance and control they can achieve with local data center infrastructure. Today we are announcing a new joint solution to support customers’ data storage needs. Later this year, joint Box and IBM customers will be able to use cloud content management from Box with IBM Cloud Object Storage in the US as a storage option.

This new collaboration builds on the work IBM and Box are already doing to provide Box Zones to customers in Europe and Canada. With Box Zones, businesses around the globe can adopt Box as their modern content management platform, while taking advantage of the reach and scale of IBM Cloud’s global data center footprint to store files in-region.

Join us at BoxWorks in San Francisco or visit our website to learn more about the IBM-Box partnership.