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The Logan Bartlett Show · 3 min · Mar 28, 2025

Topic-specific hubs give enterprise AI a clearer source of truth

ALAaron Levie · CEO, Box

Box Hubs let users ask questions against a known set of files, such as HR or sales documents.

In this episode

Full analysis
  1. 13:09AI agents can expand software into service budgets4 min
  2. 26:56Enterprise AI demand is unlike early cloud adoption4 min
  3. 38:45AI-generated software does not remove customer responsibility5 min
  4. 2:06Standalone model vendors face a pricing squeeze4 min
  5. 8:28Business agents have clearer product-market fit than consumer agents3 min
  6. 18:21AI products can build switching costs through accumulated learning8 min
  7. 34:45Fast-moving AI layers should stay replaceable3 min
  8. 53:28Topic-specific hubs give enterprise AI a clearer source of truth3 min
Up next · Unsupervised LearningInference is cheap enough to justify much more thinking5:45
“If you go to a hub, in our case, you kind of know by hub, what does it have access to?”
ALAaron Levieat 54:24 · The Logan Bartlett Show
54:24

Takeaways

  1. Create a knowledge portal for each topic.
  2. Let users ask questions against a known document set.
  3. Narrower context can reduce hallucinations.

About this segment

Box Hubs let users ask questions against a known set of files, such as HR or sales documents. Scoping the source helps ground answers in authoritative content and reduce hallucinations.

AL

Aaron Levie

Aaron Levie is cofounder and CEO of Box.

  • Logan Bartlett, Host · Managing director, Redpoint Ventures

    Backs enterprise software companies like Ramp, Cribl, Cyera and Legora.

From “Box CEO on Enterprise AI Trends No One is Talking About Yet”, Mar 28, 2025. Watch the full episode

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 53:40

    There's two features we're most excited about. The first is we have this product called Hubs. And what Hubs does is if you go to Box and you go to any file system, you create a folder, you put files in the folder, you share that with people. You have this problem, which is, well, like folders are kind of like unintuitive for the recipient because they're like, Like, I don't know, like, which, you know, which third subfolder down did you put the, you know, the sales material that I'm looking for to use for my, you know, customer pitch.

  2. 54:12

    So we created hubs, which is an overlay onto folders. So you can put as many of your files and folders into a hub. And then you can go and just ask questions of the hub. And so this solves actually a very, very nuanced, highly important thing, which was if you go to a general purpose, just AI chat window, you have to do a lot of work to guess what stuff is on the other end of this chat window. If you go to a hub, in our case, you kind of know by hub, what does it have access to?

  3. 54:41

    So we have a sales hub, which means by definition that has all the sales information. We have an HR hub, which means it has all your HR information. So you go to the HR hub and you ask the HR question, and then we're basically doing rag on your documents for all of your HR documents. And we're doing rag on on all your sales, you know, you know, presentations. We're doing rag on all your customer support, product documentation.

  4. 55:03

    So that basically gives you these micro knowledge portals for every topic that you want. And so that that's a game changer because because you just again, the user instantly knows what topic is going to be covered in this thing. so you you dramatically reduce the hallucination you you dramatically increase the authoritative content that will be in the hub so that's pretty cool um and then the final one that that is is just working out kind of way better than we we had hoped initially like you know a year and a half ago let's say uh is just ai data extraction from documents um it sounds like way too straightforward for anybody listening but it's insanely powerful if all your job is is like review contracts review invoices, pull out data from resumes, standardize my financial reporting documentation. We can just

  5. 55:53

    now automate basically most of that. That's great. Well, Aaron, thanks for doing this. I think we covered a lot of ground, so really appreciate it.