Olivia Nottebohm
Chief Operations Officer / Box, Inc.
Box, Inc. has long been a leader as a collaborative platform for governments, companies and individuals to safely and securely create, share and store information on the cloud. Box is now expanding efforts to empower its customers by using AI to leverage new opportunities and value from their data and workflows.
Few people know the cloud better than Olivia Nottebohm, the Chief Operating Officer of Box, Inc. For nearly two decades she has worked at the highest levels of the technology and software industries helping direct and foster the rapid growth of cloud-based business solutions.
Since her appointment as COO by the Redwood City, California-based company nearly two years ago, Nottebohm has not only dedicated herself to expanding sales of Box’s cloud-based, intelligent content management platform but also to bringing to market new products that integrate artificial intelligence (AI) solutions into those systems.
AI, she explained in a recent interview, is a key part of Box’s strategy to maintain and expand its leadership in the unstructured-data segment of the cloud-based, collaborative business market.
Unstructured data, or data that isn’t easily sortable into neatly predefined formats such as a table, presents special challenges for clients as they seek to store, manage, secure and collaborate on such information which can include everything from documents and databases to video and audio.
“Box has a tremendous amount of opportunity in front of it, because it is the leader in unstructured data,” Nottebohm, 47, said. “Historically, Box has been thought of as a way to share unstructured data, collaborate on unstructured data and secure unstructured data.”
“Unless a company has been focused on that day to day for decades like Box has, it might take for granted the nuances around permissioning and governance.”
Indeed, since its founding in 2005, Box has been at the center of the cloud-based collaboration revolution, a transformation in business workflows that went into overdrive during the explosion of work-from-home employment during the Covid-19 pandemic.
As the amount and type of information created, stored and modified on the web continues to grow, integrating AI seamlessly into the Box platform is considered a key strategic move.
Nottebohm hopes it will not only consolidate Box’s role as a cutting-edge platform for secure management of information and workflows, but that it will also make Box an even more nimble provider of tools and technology to unlock the full value of its clients’ ever-rising quantities of data.
Since assuming her new post, Nottebohm – a veteran of cloud-technology companies Google, Notion and Dropbox and a former software-practice partner at McKinsey & Co. – has worked to realize a strategy aimed at combining AI with the power of the Box platform to create intelligent content workflows.
“It’s about Innovation and everything that people can imagine that they can do if they unlock the power of their own unstructured data,” Nottebohm said. “It’s limitless in terms of opportunity.”
As the senior executive responsible for go-to-market (GTM) initiatives, she believes the roll-out of new products, solutions and partnerships based on this strategy – many of them announced at the company’s 2024 BoxWorks conference in November — will greatly boost Box’s growth potential by expanding its “total addressable market” (TAM) in a highly competitive environment.
“At BoxWorks, we announced that we are really leaning into intelligent content management,” she said. “With that comes an ability to take your content and actually drive workflows from that content.”
“If you think about it, that’s a completely different TAM than previous categories that Box had been playing in,” she added. “That opens up a tremendous amount of opportunity for the company.”
But integrating AI into the platform and allowing the content itself to help drive workflows is not something you can do willy nilly, especially when many of Box’s clients depend on it not just to make their operations more flexible, but on Box’s unmatched record of making sure that the collaborative cloud can also be secure.
A major worry for many using cloud-based solutions is that file-sharing and collaborative systems, while extremely flexible, are not always 100 percent safe, opening doors for some collaborators to improperly “share” sensitive material with those not authorized to use it.
Box, however, has developed a reputation for offering a platform that puts a premium on security, so much so that it has won the business not only of many government agencies around the world but from companies such as those in finance, media and technology whose survival depends on them protecting proprietary information and customer secrecy.
“Because of Box’s longstanding delivery of this powerful content platform, and because of customers’ confidence in Box’s security and ability to collaborate on this platform, it means that we are almost the obvious choice to then be the ones that take that content to power content workflows,” Nottebohm said.
That experience means Box understands the “incredibly difficult and complex” issues around granting the access to data and information, she added.
It’s not just about giving access to the correct people, it’s about compliance with laws, regulations and standards. While some corporate and government information is open and public, other information is “classified.”
“Unless a company has been focused on that day to day for decades like Box has, it might take for granted the nuances around permissioning and governance when really it’s probably going to be the key underpinning of any content-driven workflow,” Nottebohm said. “You have to have that anchoring as a company in order to deliver what would actually make sense to an enterprise.”
“We’re at a new era where we can drive automation and processes to try to take the unrewarding work out of people’s day.”
Box’s strategy for growth and expansion into AI-driven content workflows is based on four pillars, Nottebohm said:
- Building intelligent content management (ICM) solutions and making sure Box is a leader in content plus AI.
- Establishing Box as a content-based workflow solution.
- Extending Box’s reach through partners.
- Becoming more verticalized in its market focus.
“It’s making sure we anchor ourselves in the business need of our customers as it relates to unstructured data and partnering with them on the business problem they’re trying to solve,” Nottebohm said. “Then, you combine that with AI, and we’re able to help them solve these business needs.”
Partnerships involve a wide range of activities from working with system integrators (SIs) both large and small who connect the Box platform into larger data and workflow networks. Box already works with more than 1,500 independent software vendors (ISVs), she said.
“We know that as we move into these much more complex solutions that we need to bring to the table an SI who is able to architect workflows and is able to work through an enterprise’s connecting of content,” Nottebohm explained.
“We have already partnered historically with partners in the ecosystem,” she continued. “But we are now much more leaning into boutique SIs that are focused on ECM (enterprise content management) practices and digital-transformation practices.”
Box is also working with large SIs such as Deloitte that already have strong AI and digital-transformation practices, as well as with so-called cloud-data “hyperscalers” such as Google Drive, AWS and Microsoft, she added.
“We know that their solution for their customers will be better when Box is included as the content platform, and more specifically, the intelligent-content platform in that stack that they deliver,” Nottebohm said.
As for verticalization, Box has major focuses on financial services, government, health care, retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) and hopes its new intelligent content workflows will not only boost corporate efficiency but reduce drudgery for employees.
“We’re at a new era where we can drive automation and processes to try to take the unrewarding work out of people’s day,” Nottebohm concluded. “I want people to know that all of that can be done on the Box platform 100% seamlessly.”
