Dropbox recently announced the launch of Dash for Business, which is a new AI-powered universal search tool, designed to make it easier for business team members to search, organize, share, and protect content from across connected apps from within one place. The company says it is ideal for businesses both big and small, and that it gives IT admins more visibility and control over the content people on their teams share and access.

"Productivity apps have revolutionized the way we work, and the AI boom has created even more platforms and products designed to streamline our processes," Dropbox said in a blog post. "But these tools are often siloed from one another, contributing to the big, messy problem of information fragmentation. And having to track stuff down isn’t just a minor inconvenience—it’s a persistent and costly toll on your time and your attention."

A similar product simply called "Dash" was released for general Dropbox users last year, but the new business version improves the search experience to help businesses reduce security risks via in-depth content access controls and by ensuring sensitive information isn’t surfaced unintentionally. The company says it has been developing and improving the technology for years and that early partners have dubbed it a "game-changer."

Business users can search a keyword, question, description, or a command, and Dash will understand what is meant (using AI), and find what the user is looking for if it’s available. Users can also have Dash summarize content without having to open a file, tab, or document. It will work with Dropbox itself, as well as with Google Drive, OneDrive, Notion, Asana, and other apps. Users can add email, calendars, files, etc. so that they’re all searchable via Dash. The idea is that the more apps that are connected, the more useful the product becomes.

"We developed Dash for Business with both employees and business admins in mind," the company said. "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. Dash for Business makes sure only the right people and right teams have access to certain company data while ensuring others don’t. Admins can view who has access at the individual document level or update permissions in bulk in just seconds."

The existing Dropbox Stacks (collections that allow grouping, organizing, and sharing content with colleagues), can now be used at the company level and have in-depth sharing permissions for internal and external viewers with the new Dash update. This is supposed to make it easier to gather everything from the same project so that it’s easily accessible when edits are made by team members.

A new Answers feature uses AI so that users can ask questions about content and get insights by generating follow-up questions. It will then surface related content links based on the original search query.

It’s worth noting that Dropbox Dash uses self-hosted AI by default so that customer data remains within Dropbox’s own network without relying on third-party AI platforms. This is to maintain the privacy of businesses and users.