Information technology / Business software and AI
Dropbox: Searching work documents and handling step-by-step questions
- Company
- Dropbox
- Country
- United States
- Adoption stage
- In operation
- Source published
- Date basis
- The date the source was published. It can differ from the date adoption started.
- How the source was checked
- Read the full source text
The work problem
Dropbox saw that the information people work with is scattered across many applications and many formats. Finding the right document, message or piece of information meant switching between apps and searching by hand, which took a long time. For the business this hurt collaboration and productivity, and it could also lead to security problems when sensitive material surfaced where it should not.
Technology and data
Dropbox launched Dash, which lets people search across their apps in one place, and put retrieval augmented generation and AI agents inside it. Retrieval uses a lexical index with chunking and reranking added on the fly so that speed and quality hold together, and it was designed not to be tied to one model provider. The agents break a question into several steps and then write that logic as code in a small Python like language built at Dropbox. The code is checked by static analysis for safety and correctness before it runs, and when missing functionality is found the model is called a second time to fill it in. What each person can see is set by fine grained access controls.
Results
Dropbox said it keeps more than 95 percent of its queries under two seconds while holding result quality. Answer quality was checked with metrics the team tuned by hand. It described passing the retrieved evidence back through a model to score whether the final answer was correct, a second check for whether every aspect of the question was covered, and metrics for how accurately the passages needed for the answer were retrieved.
Limits and open questions
The source does not give numbers for how much search time users saved after Dash went in. It also does not publish the measured values of the quality metrics.
Sources
- Building Dash: How RAG and AI agents help us meet the needs of businessesdropbox.tech, Accessed
Compiled from public sources. These are not results from ATF Works customers.