M+E Connections

Box is upbeat about artificial intelligence (AI) and believes the technology will play a significant role in its future, according to Box CEO and chairman Aaron Levie.

“We are incredibly excited about the opportunity for AI very broadly within the enterprise, but specifically, certainly within our context,” he said May 31 during an earnings call for his company’s first quarter (ended April 30).

He explained: “If you think about how much information Box manages for our customers — all of the different workflows, all the different ways that content is interacted with, all the amount of information that’s in Box, where customers today can’t search or discover because it’s unstructured data like images and videos and audio content — we see an unbelievable opportunity for AI to increase the productivity of our users and help provide insights around information that wasn’t otherwise discoverable through manual processes or it just was so inefficient or cost prohibitive to do it without artificial intelligence.”

Throughout this year, we will see product announcements and “more direction from a roadmap standpoint that really brings intelligence into Box,” he went on to tell analysts. He didn’t provide any specifics, but said: “We think this is going to be fundamental to the future of our company and our product, and the really exciting thing is that some of our biggest technology partners — companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM and others — are some of the biggest providers and developers of this technology where we can plug certain capabilities into Box and provide sort of a force multiplier for our customers leveraging some of those capabilities.”

Box is “very excited about what this is going to mean for our products and for our customer base and we think it can truly transform the way that people and organizations are working with their information and working together and we expect to have some exciting updates throughout this year on this front,” he said.

Box shares were trading 3.96% higher at $19.44 the morning of June 1, after the company reported first-quarter revenue grew 30% from a year ago, to $117.2 million. Its loss, however, widened to $40.1 million from $38.6 million.

The first quarter represented a “strong start” to the company’s fiscal 2018, Levie told analysts. The results “demonstrate the significant need for cloud content management in all industries and the inherent leverage in our business model,” he said. Box “grew our leadership in the market” during the quarter and now has more than 74,000 paying customers, including new or expanded deployments with McDonald’s and several other customers, he said.

Box also “saw particularly strong traction” in its international markets, including Canada and Japan, and also saw growth in new products including Box Governance and Zones and “further momentum with our strategic partnerships” with companies including IBM, he said.

During the current fiscal year, Box is “focusing on two major objectives,” he told analysts: “innovating in cloud content management with additional products and platform capabilities to help move enterprise workloads to the cloud,” as well as “advancing our global go-to-market efforts so that we can reach more enterprises all around the world.” Box “made solid progress on both fronts” in the first quarter, he noted.