Box AI for Documents: Ask Questions of Contracts and Policies

Box AI lets people ask questions of a stored file, or a small group of files, and get summaries, key points, drafts and answers with citations to the source text. Before turning it on, confirm your plan includes it, clean up who can open sensitive folders, enable it for a pilot group first, and test it on a non-sensitive folder.

The permission check is the one that catches people out. Box AI does not create new access; Box's AI Trust page says it is governed by Box's built-in permissions, so people can only use it on files they are already allowed to open. That sounds reassuring until you find how many folders in a ten-year-old account are open to the whole company by accident. An assistant that answers questions in seconds turns a forgotten folder setting into a leak that someone discovers by asking a casual question.

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What Box AI does with a stored file

Box AI for Documents works inside Box. A person opens a file in Preview, selects the Box AI button and types a question or picks a suggested prompt. The answers come with citations that point to the passage in the file, which is the feature that makes the output checkable. According to Box's help pages, it can:

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• Summarise a document and find its key points.
• Draft an outline based on a document.
• Answer specific questions about the file, with follow-up questions in the same chat.
• Show citations for the source text behind a response, and let you copy responses.
• Work across several files at once, from the Files page, a folder, a collection or search results, up to 10 files at a time, on Enterprise Plus and above.

Around that core sit other products with their own switches. Box AI for Hubs lets people ask questions across a curated set of content in a Box Hub. Box Extract pulls structured fields out of documents. Box AI Studio, offered on Enterprise Advanced, lets you build custom agents. Each has its own plan requirements and settings, so decide which you are enabling instead of switching on "AI" in general.

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For a business owner the practical uses are short. Ask a supplier contract what the notice period is. Ask the staff handbook how many days of carry-over leave are allowed. Ask a long expenses policy which receipts it requires for travel claims. These are reading jobs, where the file does the talking and the AI finds the place.

What Box AI handles badly

Box lists its own limits, and they matter more than the feature list. Check them before promising staff anything.

The first row deserves a worked example. A supplier agreement of 90 pages with long schedules may hold more than 2MB of text. If the termination clause sits on page 85, the answer might rest on what the model read, not on the clause itself. Ask the question in a way that forces a citation, then open the cited page. If no citation points near the end of the document, assume the end was not read.

Plan, price and units: check what you are paying for

Box's pricing page shows integrated Box AI from the Business plan upward, and Box's own documentation says Box AI for Documents is available on Business and above. In dollars, Business is $15 per user a month billed annually or $20 billed monthly (three-user minimum), Business Plus $25 or $33, and Enterprise $35 or $47. The page shows local currency to some visitors and prices change, so confirm the figure you see before you budget. Business Starter and the single-user plans do not list Box AI.

Some AI usage is measured in units. The pricing page shows 1,000 AI Units a month on Enterprise and 2,000 on Enterprise Plus, with Enterprise Advanced starting at 20,000, and an AI Units add-on sold per 1,000 units a month, with a minimum of 1,000 units bought annually. Business and Business Plus include 50,000 API calls a month and no AI Units; Box's units page says units are available to buy on those plans. Box's configuration page says Business, Business Plus and Enterprise get Box AI for Documents and Notes when the admin switches it on, while the Box AI APIs need purchased units.

The detail that matters for a small business: Box's page on AI Units says ordinary questions asked in the Box web app do not use units, although Box applies a daily quota to them. Units are spent by the APIs, automated workflows and other at-scale use, and unused units expire at the end of each period rather than rolling over.

Two practical consequences follow. First, if you plan to use the APIs or automated workflows, ask your Box account manager what happens when the unit allowance or the daily quota runs out, because the pages do not say. Second, the plan decides which features exist at all. If a manager wants to ask questions across a folder of ten contracts, the plan must be Enterprise Plus or higher; on Business that question simply cannot be asked. Decide what jobs you want before you decide whether the plan is enough.

Where Box sits among AI tools for files is a separate question, covered in what a chat assistant can see when you connect your Drive and inbox. The difference to keep in mind: Box AI works inside the system that already holds your permissions, which is an advantage, while an outside assistant needs its own connection and its own review.

Check one: the agreement and the addendum

Box AI is not simply on or off. Box's configuration page says that if it is the first Box AI feature you enable, the Box AI Product Addendum appears when you open Edit Configuration, and you have to read it, tick the acceptance box and select Accept before you proceed. If a "Review Agreement Offline" message shows on the Box AI tab, your current agreement does not allow Box AI, and you need to contact your Box account team or support.

Read the addendum with a short list of questions, and ask your account team for any answer the document does not give:

• Is customer content used to train any model, Box's or a third party's?
• Which model providers process the content, and where?
• How long are prompts and responses retained, and can you see or delete them?
• Are there content types or classifications that Box AI will not process?
• What happens to AI features if the agreement ends?

Box's AI Trust page answers two of these. It says Box will not train AI models on customers' content without their explicit approval, and that Box AI uses foundation models from several vendors, such as Microsoft Azure and Google. It does not say how long prompts and responses are kept, so get that answer, and the current list of providers, in writing from your account team. If you have signed a client contract that limits where client data may be processed, the addendum is what you read against it. What to check in an AI tool's privacy policy and terms gives a longer list of questions you can adapt.

Check two: who can already open what

This is the check that deserves the most time. If Box AI answers from whatever the asker can open, the safety of the answers depends entirely on the safety of the folders. Over years, accounts collect three kinds of problem: folders shared with "everyone in the company" for a one-off project and never narrowed, shared links that allow anyone with the link to open a file, and former colleagues or external partners who still sit on a collaborator list.

A realistic way to audit, without special tools, for a business of up to a few dozen staff:

1. List the ten most sensitive folders: contracts, HR files, payroll, board papers, client files, pricing and margin sheets, insurance, legal correspondence, bank details, and any folder holding personal data.
2. For each, open the folder's sharing settings and write down who has access, whether a shared link exists and who can use it, and whether any external collaborator appears.
3. Remove or narrow anything that does not match a current need. Put access on groups, not individuals, where you can.
4. Repeat for subfolders that inherit access from the top, since a restricted subfolder inside a wide folder behaves differently from a wide subfolder inside a restricted one.
5. Record what you changed, and who agreed to it.

Here is an illustrative case. A twelve-person firm has a "Contracts" folder, shared company-wide in 2021 for a tendering project. Inside it, a supplier agreement contains negotiated discounts. Before Box AI, staff outside purchasing would never have opened it. After Box AI, a salesperson asks the assistant "what discount does our main supplier give us?" and gets a correct answer with a citation. The permission was always there; the AI made it easy to use. Tightening the folder before enabling the feature is cheaper than explaining the disclosure afterwards.

The same clean-up is the first job in cleaning up SharePoint permissions before turning on Copilot, so if you also use Microsoft 365 you will do it twice, but only need to understand it once.

Check three: who gets it, and in what order

In the Admin Console, open the Box AI section, then the Settings tab. Box's configuration page lists four options for each Box AI service (Box AI Home, Box AI for Files, Box AI for Notes, Box AI for Hubs and Box AI for official Box integrations): Disable for all managed users; Enable for all managed users, which is the default; Enable for select users and groups; and Enable for everyone except select users and groups. The two selective options accept up to 100 names or email addresses and up to 100 groups, and beyond that you must change the setting for the whole organisation. The Box AI APIs and Box AI Studio configurations have simpler on or off switches.

A sensible order for a small business:

1. Switch Box AI on for a pilot group of five to ten people from different teams, including the person who knows the folders best.
2. Leave it off for everyone else for two weeks.
3. Extend to the rest of the company, except any group whose files you have decided not to expose, such as HR.

The "everyone except" option is useful for the last step. Create a group for people who should not use it yet, and exclude them, instead of selecting hundreds of names.

Because the default is "Enable for all managed users", a click on the main Enable Box AI button for all services may enable more than you intended. Use Edit Configuration on each service and look at what is set, before you press anything that says all.

Check four: the capability switches under Box AI for Files

After you choose who gets access, Box's page says you can set agent capabilities. Enable File Q&A is the switch for question-and-answer on a file. Enable File Metadata Autofill is disabled by default, with two further options, Enable references and Enable confidence levels, both off by default. Metadata autofill means Box AI fills structured fields on a file, such as a contract's renewal date, from the text.

Leave autofill off during the pilot. The question-and-answer feature shows its working through citations, which makes mistakes visible. Autofill writes values into fields that later feed searches, reports and reminders, so a wrong date can sit unnoticed for months. If you do turn it on, turn on references and confidence levels with it, so each filled field says where it came from and how sure the model is, and review a sample of fields every month.

A test on a non-sensitive folder, with a scorecard

Never test on the files that matter most. Make a test folder with five to eight documents that are safe to share: your public terms, a template contract with invented names, an old staff handbook with the sensitive parts removed, a price list and a spreadsheet of sample figures. Put in one deliberately long document and one that is a scan with no readable text.

Write 20 questions whose answers you know. Mix easy lookups ("how many days' notice does the template contract require?"), questions that need two places in a document, a question whose answer is not in the file, a numeric question, and one that is worded badly. Run each, open the citation, and score it.

This is an illustrative result, and it matches what Box's limits would lead you to expect: reliable on lookups, honest when the answer is absent, weak on numbers, patchy at the end of a long file. Write the lessons into your staff guidance. The "answer not in file" row is the one to watch: a good result is a plain "not found", and a bad one is a confident invention.

Then run the permission test. Create a second user with no access to a restricted test folder and ask a question whose answer sits inside it. The right outcome is that the user cannot select the file, or that Box AI reports it cannot answer. Only after this passes should you move on to files that matter.

What a contract question and a policy question look like

Here are two illustrative exchanges, so the output is not a surprise.

Question (file: supplier agreement): What notice does either party have to give to end this agreement, and does anything change in the first year?
Answer: Either party may end the agreement with 90 days' written notice. In the first 12 months, notice must be given by the buyer only for breach, not convenience. Citations: Section 14.1, Section 14.3.

Fix: open both sections. If section 14.3 was amended by a later document saved as a separate file, the answer is out of date. Ask again with the amendment file selected as well (multi-file questions are available on the higher plans), and add a note in your contract folder saying which file supersedes which.

Question (file: staff handbook): How many days of annual leave can be carried over, and who approves it?
Answer: Up to 5 days may be carried over to the next year with written manager approval. Citation: Section 6.4.

Fix: check whether the handbook has a newer version in another folder. Policy questions fail less because the AI misreads than because staff open an old copy. Name the current version clearly and archive the rest.

If your use is mainly contract review rather than lookup, whether AI can review a contract sets the limits on what you should expect.

A short instruction for staff

Staff need three sentences, not a policy document, at the start. Illustrative wording you can adapt:

• Use Box AI to find and summarise; open the cited passage before you rely on an answer.
• Do not trust figures, totals or dates from an answer without checking the document.
• If you can ask about a file you think you should not see, tell the admin the same day.

The last line matters most. It turns every user into a permissions tester. If you do not yet have a written AI policy, writing an AI usage policy for a small business takes an afternoon.

Looking after it after launch

A switched-on feature needs a monthly look. Put a calendar entry in for the admin:

1. Check unit or API usage against the allowance on your plan, so you are not surprised by a limit.
2. Review the list of people who have the feature, and remove leavers and role changes.
3. Sample five folders for new shared links or external collaborators.
4. Check Box's admin updates for new settings; features arrive with defaults you did not choose, and Box's own help pages change as the product does.
5. Rerun five of the test questions after any big change to your folder structure.

Box AI is a good fit for a business that already keeps its documents in Box and wants faster answers from them, and a poor fit for one that wants an assistant to reason across everything it owns. If you want a second view on where AI belongs in your document handling, that is the sort of question a 1:1 call is for. Otherwise, the four checks and a test folder will take you from "switch it on" to "switched on, with eyes open" in about two weeks.

Questions admins ask before enabling Box AI

Can Box AI read files a user cannot open?

Box's AI Trust page says Box AI is governed by Box's built-in permissions, so users can only work with files they are allowed to access. Test it rather than assume it. Ask a test user with no access to a restricted folder a question about a file inside it, and confirm the answer is a refusal. Then fix any folder where the test fails.

Is Box AI available on every Box plan?

No. Box's pricing page shows integrated Box AI from the Business plan upwards and does not list it for Business Starter or the single-user plans. Multi-file questions need Enterprise Plus or above, and the custom agent builder, Box AI Studio, needs Enterprise Advanced. Check the plan comparison on Box's page and your own contract.

Can I switch Box AI on for one team only?

Yes. In the Admin Console you can enable it for selected users and groups, or for everyone except some, with up to 100 names or email addresses and 100 groups per setting. A pilot group of five to ten people is a sensible start, because it limits exposure while you learn how staff use it.

Does Box AI replace a lawyer's review of a contract?

No. It can summarise a contract and find clauses quickly, and it shows citations so you can check, but Box itself says results on numbers, tables and calculations may be inaccurate. Use it to find what to read, then read it. For decisions with legal consequences, a qualified adviser still reviews the document.

Further reads

• How to Summarise Bundles and Transcripts With AI Safely — Summarising long document bundles without losing the detail.
• Are Chat-With-PDF Tools Safe for Contracts and Client Files? — Judging chat-with-your-files tools for confidential documents.
• AI Document Extraction vs Traditional OCR: Which Should You Use? — Pulling fields from documents, a job Box also offers.
• How to Mention AI Use in Client Contracts and Proposals — Say how you use AI in contracts and proposals with clients.
• ChatPDF vs ChatGPT for Reading Supplier Contracts: What Each Handles — A supplier-contract review method that checks page evidence, amendments, upload limits, sharing and confidentiality before trusting AI answers.
• AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.

Sources: Box's pricing page; Box's AI Trust page; Box documentation on configuring Box AI, Box AI for Documents and Box AI Units.