Box Inc. and Salesforce Inc.’s Slack unit today debuted a set of new integrations between their platforms to improve the user experience for joint customers.
The main focus of the product update is Box AI, a chatbot that the file sharing provider launched last year. It allows users to ask questions about a file and receive answers in a natural language format. The chatbot also lends itself to related tasks such as summarizing and translating text.
For users of Box’s Enterprise Plus subscription tier, Box AI is now available in Slack with no query limit. That means workers can access the chatbot through the collaboration platform’s interface and use it to interact with files stored in Box. A marketer, for example, could ask Box AI to pull information about the performance of a recent ad campaign into a Slack channel.
The companies are also rolling several other enhancements as part of their expanded partnership. Joint customers have access to a tool that makes it possible to preview PDFs, spreadsheets and other files from a Box folder in Slack. The companies say that previews now receive changes made to upstream Box files within a few seconds, which ensures users have access to the latest information.
Both the file preview feature and Box AI are tied to the access controls that companies define in Box. Workers can only interact with Box-managed documents via Slack if they first receive permission to use them in the file sharing platform. There’s no need for administrators to separately define file access rules in Slack, which saves time.
Some enterprises use Box and Slack together with Salesforce’s popular customer relationship management platform. For such customers, the companies are rolling out a new feature that makes it possible to link a set of Salesforce and Slack accounts to the same Box folders. This arrangement is meant to ease the task of sharing business data across the services.
“Whether you are working on customer presentations, legal contracts, a budget spreadsheet, or any other file, you can leverage Box AI to get insights and answers without ever leaving your Slack environment,” said Box Chief Executive Officer Aaron Levie.
The new integrations are available today. Later this year, Box plans to follow up the update with a set of enhancements to its Box AI chatbot.
The chatbot is integrated with several parts of the company’s file sharing platform including Hubs, a tool that allows customers to create department-specific file collections. Box detailed last month that it plans to upgrade the Hubs version of Box AI to OpenAI’s flagship GPT-4o model. The company says that the move will add improved support for more than 20 languages as well as new ways of interacting with multimodal content.
The GPT-4o integration is set to roll out alongside a Box AI application programming interface. According to the company, the API allow developers to integrate the chatbot’s document processing capabilities into their services.