The 5X AI reality check: why enterprises are leaving transformative value on the table

Your content structure is holding you back

Sponsored Post AI leaders are using agents across thousands of documents simultaneously, automating entire workflows and delivering real value. They get five times the productivity from AI than the average company. And you can achieve the same, if you lay the right foundations.

Yesterday's prevalent AI use case was deploying assistants to help with specific tasks. Today, it's using specialized agents for specific tasks. Tomorrow, it will be running agents at scale across larger workflows and data sets. Agents can already run for tens of hours on complex tasks, but that takes some serious effort. You must be able to manage state across sessions, using checkpoints to handle long-running transactions, plus, co-ordinate multi-step workflows at scale.

Moving to this cutting edge means venturing outside your comfort zone and treating AI as a non-deterministic tool. Rather than delivering predictable results, it will provide slightly different outputs each time. This creative spark is what makes it valuable, but you must be able to trust that output. That means relying on robust data.

That data is what separates the leaders from the laggards. The winners build content infrastructure that can support scaled AI operations. They use document metadata that helps AI agents understand context. Metadata gives AI agents explicit information that they can use to organize and draw upon information more efficiently and accurately. It helps answer questions such as who has permission to access and share it. Without this metadata, companies risk falling into permissions chaos. Anyone can create, access, and share documents, which end up sprawling unmanaged across formats and systems. There's no audit trail to track who did what and when.

The competitive implications of disorganized data compound faster than most executives realize. Organizations running inefficient AI workflows due to poor content structure will fall further behind as their competitors' cost-per-task drops and their throughput climbs. What looks like a modest underinvestment today becomes a strategic impediment tomorrow.

How to begin

If you're spending less than your coffee budget on AI API usage, you're not working it hard enough. To fix it, Box advises picking up to three high-ROI workloads with current bottlenecks and measurable outcomes such as time-to-decision, error rate, or audit coverage. Run a 4-6 week pilot tracking those metrics. Pick the toughest workflow, such as one normally taking a hundred people a month to complete and give an AI agent a week to tackle it, with appropriate checkpoints and human oversight along the way.

Box is the leading Intelligent Content Management platform that unlocks value from unstructured data. At its flagship event, Box demonstrated that context and content readiness — not just AI models — separate leaders from laggards.

Interested in learning more? Start by reading Box's insights on how to get your content AI-ready.

Sponsored by Box.