On Thursday 5 November, at the BoxWorks 2026 conference in San Francisco, Box said it was working with Nvidia to build a new search engine for AI agents. Called Box Context Retrieval, the engine is based on Nvidia’s Nemotron Retriever models.

Box chief executive Aaron Levie described the idea to TechCrunch: ‘Instead of an agent having to kind of read through each document, we can send back chunks from the documents that are most relevant to the user’s query or whatever the task is that the agent is doing.’

How the search works

Ben Kus, Box’s chief technology officer, told investors that the system handles different file formats and creates text indexes and embeddings from them. When files change, the system updates the indexes. These details come from an article generated automatically by MarketBeat and published by Yahoo Finance.

An embedding is a sequence of numbers that represents the meaning of a text. It lets a search find a passage on the same subject even if that passage uses different words. Box’s search combines this meaning-based search with ordinary keyword search.

Box’s press release says the search also covers scanned documents, images, audio and video. An agent receives information only from content the user has permission to access.

The figures come from the companies

In its press release, Box says customers could improve search accuracy by 20 per cent, cut token use by 90 per cent and get answers four times faster. Accuracy was measured with the Recall@5 metric, which shows what share of the relevant passages appear among the first five search results.

Kus presented the figures as results from Box’s own tests, putting the accuracy gain at more than 20 per cent. MarketBeat reported that he did not say what the results were compared against. Kari Briski, Nvidia’s VP of generative AI software, gave TechCrunch the same figures as expectations. She described the accuracy gain, however, as a 20 per cent lower error rate. The number of hits among the top results and the error rate are different metrics.

MarketBeat reported that Levie said the search product complements other systems rather than competing with them. Levie described it as an option for customers who do not want to build and maintain their own search system.

Availability

Box said Context Retrieval will become available to Enterprise Advanced customers in early 2027. SiliconANGLE reported that it will also come to Shield subscribers. Box itself notes in its press release that unreleased features may be delayed or never delivered.

Enterprise Advanced customers can already use Nvidia’s Nemotron models in Box AI, starting with Nemotron 3 Ultra. Nemotron models are open-weight models, meaning their model weights are freely available.