Dropbox introduces generative AI-powered products to make knowledge work easier

Cloud storage service provider personal box today unveiled a suite of AI-powered products designed to make knowledge work easier. The company’s latest offerings, Dropbox Dash and Dropbox AI, aim to boost productivity and streamline workflows, giving users a more personalized work experience.

According to the company, these products are just the beginning of a series of personalized AI experiences that Dropbox plans to release. The goal is to provide ways for customers to discover, organize and manage their work on the Dropbox platform.

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“The cloud world lacked an organizational layer to everything, and we believe Dropbox is apt to be that self-organizing digital container,” Sateesh Srinivasan, VP and GM of Dropbox, told VentureBeat. “We’ve been investing in AI and ML to improve our products for a long time, and our new offerings will deliver personalized AI/ML experiences to improve our customers’ work lives and help them get more out of their content in Dropbox.”

The company’s latest AI-powered universal search tool, Dash, allows users to quickly locate information across all of their tools, content, and apps using a single search bar.

With integration capabilities for major platforms such as Google Workspace, Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce and Notion, Dash offers a personalized experience by organizing all content in one platform. A key feature is universal search, which allows users to search all apps and tabs in one place.

Additionally, Dropbox AI ensures quick access to information within file thumbnails. It can generate concise abstracts from documents and video previews. Additionally, the Ask Questions feature allows users to extract insights from lengthy Dropbox documents and videos simply by asking questions.

While Dropbox AI is initially available for documents and video previews, the company plans to expand its capabilities to include folders and entire Dropbox accounts in the near future.

Similar to the AI ​​announcement from cloud-based content management company Dropbox Box also recently introduced Box AI, a feature that allows users to perform general searches for specific keywords within documents and ask questions about the content.

These developments highlight the industry’s current collective efforts to improve search capabilities and enable more meaningful interactions with document-based insights.

Content organization and retrieval using generative AI

Dropbox’s Srinivasan said that as organizational work processes have changed in recent years, the company now provides products that address the challenges customers face in today’s modern workplace.

He pointed out that Dropbox Dash and Dropbox AI represent the initial wave of AI-powered offerings designed to address this challenge.

“We want to alleviate that feeling of digital decision overwhelm and fatigue that comes with managing an increasing number of content and cloud tools and apps,” Srinivasan told VentureBeat. “We’re applying more personalized AI to our customers so they can quickly find what they need, get insights into their content, or ask questions about their content or their company’s information.”

As users today have to deal with large amounts of content spread across various apps, files and URLs, they have expressed the need for greater adaptability in how they organize and locate their cloud content.

Dash builds connections with popular tools and apps to meet this demand, making it easy for users to find and access their content, regardless of location or format. Using machine learning, the tool identifies, organizes, and presents relevant content crucial to a client’s work, such as unfinished documents or materials related to upcoming meetings.

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Dash continuously learns, evolves, and improves as a customer uses it for content research and organization. The company plans to further expand Dash integrations.

A new feature called Stacks offers intelligent collections for saving, organizing and retrieving URLs, providing a convenient organizational layer for your cloud content. The home page acts as a central dashboard, granting users easy access to Dash’s universal search, stacks, and links to recent work, as well as the ability to start meetings.

Similarly, Dropbox’s AI will allow customers to summarize large documents or videos, such as contracts and meeting recordings, into an explanation in the Web Thumbnails view by clicking the “Ask” button. It also helps customers get the insights they need from their content without manually searching for large files.

“We are expanding this functionality to Dropbox folders and ultimately a customer’s entire Dropbox account in the coming months,” Srinivasan said. “We want to advance the AI ​​ecosystem and support the next generation of startups that are taking the lead in shaping the modern work experience through the power of AI.”

What’s next for Dropbox?

The company stressed that security and privacy remain integral to Dropbox and will continue to prioritize them in the age of AI. Srinivasan also highlighted Dropbox’s recognition of the importance of responsible AI product development and its plan to publish AI principles to guide users as part of this effort.

He said customers are looking for a personalized AI experience, and the company is working to enhance the existing user experience and introduce more intelligence into their content and workflows.

“We have believed for many years in the potential of AI to completely transform knowledge-based work,” said Srinivasan. “Over the past few months, recent advances in AI and ML have opened up a new world of possibilities that we think will help us accelerate our roadmap and ultimately our mission to engineer a more enlightened way of working.”