Box Announces Hubs, A Custom Portal To Share Specialized Content

Over the years, companies have looked for better ways to share content, but the file/folder metaphor persists. This works well for ad hoc sharing between individuals or small groups, but for larger groups, it can be difficult to understand content in folders without context. Enter Box Hubs, a new tool for creating centralized microsites for sharing specific types of content. It was announced today at the Boxworks customer conference.

Aaron Levy, the company's CEO and co-founder, said the problem is something the company had been thinking about solving for a decade, but grew during the lockdown when content sharing became important. Today, with the advent of generative AI, this type of content portal has become even more useful.

“Box Hubs are basically the ability to curate content from your Box account and then publish it to the audience you want, but in a personalized, curated way within your company, and the use cases are endless,” Levy told TechCrunch.

This takes the form of a dedicated portal designed to contain things like HR policies, brand assets, or the latest pricing information for the sales team. In this case, each file and folder will lose something in translation, but its purpose will be clear in a portal like this.

Image credit: Box

Where is the role of artificial intelligence in this? The hub's format provides a highly curated set of information for research, something Levy admits he hadn't considered before ChatGPT arrived last year.

“One of the biggest problems with AI is that if you're running AI queries on large amounts of unstructured data for every aspect of your business, it's actually very difficult. The problem is that you're often hallucinating or getting wrong answers from the AI ​​because AI has many different sources of information to answer questions.

Box realized that applying generative AI to search a single content repository like Box Hub would actually produce more accurate answers and work well with an AI-based generative search approach. "What we found, seemingly by accident, is that when you aggregate your data [on topic-specific content portals] and users ask questions in that context, you actually get much better answers and more information. It may be the right answer."

The company offers a portal creation tool, and Levy says it's fairly easy to create. “Basically, you just add a new node, give it a title, give it an icon, fill it with content, hit publish, and you're done,” he said.

Customers should ensure that portals are updated and old ones are removed. Levy said who is responsible for setting up and maintaining the node depends on the customer, but he said it's usually a department, team leader or power user who has that responsibility.

Box Hub will remain free on the Enterprise plan and above, but Box Hub with AI Search will be a separate feature only available on the Enterprise Plus plan.

It's important to note that although both products were announced today, they won't be available in beta until next year.

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