IBM and Box partner on enterprise AI for businesses

IBM; Michael Short/Bloomberg

Box Inc., a cloud storage company, announced a partnership with IBM this week to help businesses adopt enterprise AI for everyday work tasks. The partnership brings together IBM’s AI tool, watsonx, and Box AI.

Box AI is an agentic AI tool developed by Box for organizations to customize their own closed-system AI models. Within Box AI, companies can limit prompt queries to specific sets of documents or data without any complex code-building.

Enterprise AI refers to using AI models and tools at scale for large businesses handling proprietary information. IBM’s enterprise AI studio, watsonx.ai, now brings a selection of AI models to Box AI users for them to customize to their business needs. The selection includes some of IBM’s Granite large language models and recent versions of Meta’s Llama models, according to a press release.

“Financial services firms can accelerate fraud detection and risk analysis by extracting patterns from large volumes of transaction data, enabling real-time anomaly detection and reducing remediation time, all while ensuring compliance and auditability,” Dawn Lauter, senior team manager of product marketing at Box, said in a statement.

IBM partners with 90 of the world’s largest banks, including Bank of America, JPMorganChase, Citigroup and HSBC. Banks and financial services companies make up 7% of IBM’s clients as of the end of 2024, according to Data Captive.

“Traditionally, knowledge work has been constrained by the time it takes to research, create and review content,” said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box. “AI changes that, accelerating these processes exponentially. By deepening our partnership with IBM and leveraging watsonx, we’re empowering enterprises to harness AI responsibly and at scale.”

The two partnering firms are also using each other’s products as part of the partnership as well as offering them to customers. IBM’s employees now have access to ​Box AI with IBM watsonx, and Box internally uses IBM’s watsonx governance to monitor and provide guardrails for its AI models and help it comply with regulations.

“The majority of an organization’s data is often unstructured — buried within contracts, spreadsheets and presentations,” a Box representative said in the press release. “This data can be highly valuable for AI, but often highly sensitive. Building a trusted technology pipeline for AI to access this data can be essential for security and compliance efforts, particularly in highly regulated industries.”