When adopting agents, enterprises walk a fine line between data security and usefulness. Box might have a fix.

On Thursday, Box announced the general availability of the Box Agent, a tool that lets users query and act on their data on the platform using natural language. The agent works with both structured and unstructured data, acting as a unified engine across all of your enterprise’s data without letting it bleed back into the models the agent leverages.

“Our AI is as secure as everything else at Box,” Yashodha Bhavnani, head of AI at Box, told The Deep View. “While you get to use the best breed models, we make sure that you never have to worry about your data leaking back into the model.”

The Box Agent also isn’t backed by a single model, Bhavnani told me. Instead, it leverages state-of-the-art models from every major AI firm including OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, and updates them constantly as new models roll out. While users can pick which models they prefer for certain tasks, if left up to the Box agent, it will pick the best model for the task at hand.

Some of the Box Agent’s capabilities include:

• Searching across an enterprise’s entire content library for answers on enterprise data, which limits “excessive hallucination” by grounding outputs, said Bhavnani
• Creating new files in multiple file formats and completing multi-step tasks
• Analyzing specific files or collections of files and summarizing complete documents
• And interpreting natural language questions, taking into account organization-specific terminology and relevance.

In the press release, Box noted that its agent can be particularly helpful for legal, procurement, HR, sales and marketing teams. Bhavnani told me that the agent is the first step in a broader journey of bringing the “powers of contextualization” to everyone in an enterprise.

“Every customer is unique. They have their own policies, they have their own culture,” said Bhavnani. “We get to this point of contextualization, where you can truly personalize the agent for your enterprise. It truly understands the structure, and then it has the security and permission, so you feel confident using it.”

Our Deeper View

It’s no secret that agents are the future of how white collar workers will interact with AI. Box’s new agent, however, is a great example of how the platform where we use these models may be more important than the models themselves. Box’s agent creates a unified platform where any model can be utilized on your data and context, essentially turning the models themselves into commodities. Perplexity and Microsoft’s model council systems operate in much the same way, and Apple’s reported plan to open up Siri to several AI models has the same ethos. At the end of the day, whoever has the best interface may lead the AI adoption game.