When Dropbox launched Dash in June 2023, the goal was to make this AI-powered “universal search tool” a solution for organizing files and folders scattered across countless tabs and apps. Initially, Dash was tailored to personal users and freelance workers to reduce the time they spend looking for content they need to do their jobs. More than a year later, Dropbox’s Dash is being extended to the enterprise, enabling teams to “search, organize, share, and protect content from across their connected apps, all in one place.”
“I first launched Dropbox because we all needed a better way to find and access our content, no matter what device or platform it lived on,” Drew Houston, Dropbox’s Chief Executive, said in a statement. “Today, we’re solving the 2024 version of that problem: Our content is scattered everywhere and it’s hard to find the thing you need to get your work done. Dash solves that problem by helping teams find information quickly, remove friction from their day, and keep sensitive information protected.”
And there is undoubtedly a need for a service like Dash for Business. Knowledge workers interact with more files and content stored across various apps than personal users. Sometimes, it could be significantly more, especially when collaborating with many teams, so keeping things straight is critical. From cloud storage to productivity, ticket tracking, code repositories, and more, Dropbox’s Dash promises to allow workers to save time by not switching between apps.
Dash currently connects with dozens of third-party apps, including Airtable, Asana, Basecamp, Box, Confluence, Crunchbase, Evernote, Figma, GitHub, Gmail, Google Drive, LinkedIn, Intercom, Jira, Microsoft 365, Mixpanel, Notion, Okta, Quip, Salesforce, Segment, ServiceNow, Slack, X, Zendesk, and Zoom.
All the Features of Dash, but Make It for Teams
Similar to the Dash product launched for consumer users, Dash for Business has many familiar features. It has Stacks, smart collections workers can use to group, organize and share their content with their colleagues. Dropbox has enhanced this tool to be used at the company level with “in-depth sharing permissions for internal and external viewers.”
There’s also the start page, a dashboard that displays workers’ access to universal search, stacks, shortcuts to recent work, meetings and more.
A new addition to Dash is an AI-powered feature workers can use to ask questions about their content. This chatbot helps uncover deeper insights through follow-up questions and then surfaces related content links that match the original search prompt.
Something For Business Admins
The announcement comes as several other companies, including Atlassian, Intercom, and most recently, Perplexity, are also rolling out AI-driven solutions aimed at helping workers become more productive and make more innovative use of the information they have at their disposal. However, Dash for Business isn’t simply an AI search tool for larger teams. Dropbox has infused it with capabilities to ensure Dash meets with the approval of IT departments.
“We understand that manually moderating access permissions can be tedious and time-consuming, often requiring significant manpower to stay on top of potential security risks. And the more products and apps we introduce to our workplaces, the more daunting this problem becomes,” the company explains.
Dropbox’s solution to this is based on technology it received from Nira, a content governance platform the company acquired this week. Using a custom solution, IT admins can easily protect confidential documents with a few clicks, decrease and close security gaps, control which apps and services are connected to Dash, and receive alerts when files are shared with people outside the organization.
In addition, to ease administrators’ concerns about their company’s data benefiting a third-party AI platform, Dropbox states that, by default, Dash’s AI will be self-hosted. This means customer data remains stored within Dropbox.
Dropbox’s Dash for Business is now available in English and accessible on both web and desktop platforms. The company says additional markets will be supported in early 2025.
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