Dylan Smith: Yes, thank you.
Aaron Levie: Thanks.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Steve Enders with Citi. Your line is open.
Steve Enders: Okay, great. Thanks for taking the question. I guess I want to ask a bit more on the AI angle as you’re talking to customers a lot and have, you know, share some things. I guess how do you view the rate to win within some of those use cases you’re going after? And I guess what are you kind of — how are like customers thinking about their own AI investments at this point in utilizing Box versus other players out there that are talking about AI.
Aaron Levie: Yes. So I think this will be a surprise to anybody on this call, but we almost have to assume if you’re an enterprise software, you’re also in AI. So at this point, you kind of have to think about AI is almost — it’s mobile, it’s cloud, in its pervasiveness. So it’s a platform architecture that is going to exist in all technology. And then there’s kind of almost like a heat map or sensitivity of what kind of data and workflows does that enterprise software company have and how much does AI relate to that set of data and workflow. And so we’ve talked about this in the past, but by definition, large language models do really, really powerful things to large amounts of text and you see large amounts of text and documents.
And so that kind of right to win question, we house tens and tens of billions of files that are very ripe for AI helping customers understand within that content, helping automate workflows around it, helping extract metadata from those documents. And so I think our right to win is extremely strong in anything that is sort of content related from an AI use case standpoint. And so just to rattle off a few of the examples, just in the past maybe two weeks of customer conversations, you could have a large real estate organization or a private equity firm or an insurance company where they have invoices or contracts or leasing documents that come in those today have to be read by a human, processed by a human. Somebody has to extract all the data in a very manual way and large language models, either again through our interface or APIs can do a lot of that heavy lifting automatically using AI.
And so just by the nature of our business model, because we already manage that content and in many cases, orchestrate the workflows around that content, we become the natural place for plugging in the AI models to that content as well as opposed to shipping around that data to other platforms. So I think in that sense, our right to win is sort of like right in the very center of the target zone. And now it’s the journey of getting customers, educated on how to implement it, building out all of the platform components necessary and then ultimately having a business model where we can share some of that upside of the performance with customers from a pricing standpoint.
Steve Enders: Helpful hopeful context there. I do want to ask also on some of the investments, it sounds like you’re making in go-to-market with the expanded marketing initiatives, maybe some more vertical focus and the turning on the partner side. I guess is there some signal that you’re seeing out there that is leading to those incremental investments? Or how are you viewing, I guess, the efficacy of those expanded initiatives at this time.
Aaron Levie: Yes. So I think the macro color now down on the — into the daily conversations that we tend to have with customers, if you kind of look at six or nine months ago and customers planning their budgets and their cycle, maybe at the start of this year, that’s where you saw that — again, that initial ramp up of pressure of customers not having as much — as many strategic initiatives because they didn’t know where the macro is going to go and how it was going to affect their industry or business. I think you’ve had the past six months of starting to see some degree of stabilization from again, like capital and macro like we’re talking inflation rates and interest rate dynamics of where that is going to trend and so now I think the customer conversations we’re having have the ability to be more long-term oriented where customers are talking about, okay, what is their IT strategy going to look like next year?
Not dollars necessarily, but what kinds of programs and initiatives are they going to do? That gives us the signal that, okay, we can now put more emphasis on really making sure we’re in every major city with the right kind of field events, driving the right kind of digital marketing campaigns to drive more conversations. And it’s been a steady ramp up throughout the year to be clear. But I was calling it out because this is going to be a continued focal point for us. I mean, we’re planning on having the biggest digital Box works yet. We’re bringing back Box’s CIO conference. CIO works in person this October. And so I think we are seeing enough signal in the conversations that that warrant making sure we’re driving the right level of demand and pipeline.
Steve Enders: Okay, perfect. Thanks for taking the questions.
Aaron Levie: Yes, thanks.
Operator: This concludes today’s Q&A session. I will now turn the call back to Cynthia for closing remarks.
Cynthia Hiponia: Great. Thank you, everyone. As Aaron mentioned, we are holding BoxWorks on October 11, and we’ll be hosting a virtual investor product briefing at 1:00 p.m. Pacific time. We’ll be sending out more details shortly. Again, thank you, everyone, for joining us today.
Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.
