Building an Agentic Platform — Ben Kus, CTO Box

Explore the technical evolution of metadata extraction at Box and how it shaped the foundation of our AI platform. We’ll walk through our transition to an agentic-first design—why it was necessary, how we approached the rebuild, challenges we encountered along the way, and the advantages it unlocked.

Timestamps
00:00 Box's Content Platform and Enterprise Focus
01:50 Initial AI Deployment in 2023
02:54 The Challenge of Unstructured Data in Enterprises
03:56 Limitations of Pre-Generative AI Data Extraction
04:54 First Version: LLM-Based Extraction
07:05 Challenges with the Pure LLM Approach
08:58 Despair and the Need for a New Architecture
09:30 Introducing Agentic Architecture
10:04 AI Agent Reasoning Framework
10:45 Agentic Routine for Data Extraction
12:28 Advantages of Agentic Architecture
14:05 Key Lesson Learned: Build Agentic Architecture Early
18:37 Approach to Fine-tuning and Model Support

Ben Kus
CTO

Ben Kus is the Chief Technology Officer at Box and is responsible for developing Box’s technology vision and strategy and ensuring that technological resources are aligned with the company's business needs. Previously Ben was the VP of Product Management at Box. Before joining Box, Ben was the Co-Founder and CTO of Subspace, Inc., an enterprise security solution that was acquired by Box. Ben has held various leadership positions, including the role of Chief Architect for IBM, and Senior Director of Technology for BigFix, Inc. Ben studied Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley.