Did you know that the average employee toggles between 11 apps a day? With messages flying around on different apps, all this communication isn’t helping productivity.
If you’ve ever felt lost in a sea of files, emails, links and documents, you’ll know the issue. It’s almost impossible to find that “one file” we really need, which can be incredibly frustrating. And it’s not just annoying. Eleven per cent of work is recreated each year because people don’t know or trust – or simply can’t find – what’s already out there.
Creative professionals often work across a complex web of applications. The sheer amount of content they deal with can make it difficult to have a clear overview of projects, find assets and track feedback. If you’ve ever spent ages searching through files looking for the latest one, or the one with the feedback on it, you’re not alone.
Can’t AI help with that? It can, but consumer tools don’t understand context and other office AI tools tend to only work within their own ecosystem. What’s needed is an application that truly understands your business context and the operational nuances of the creative job you do – something that actually gets you and your role.
That’s where Dropbox Dash comes in. Dash works as a personalised ‘teammate’, which searches all your files and applications to help you locate exactly what you need, and fast. As it is context-aware it truly understands your creative role, and learns from your usage, so over time it becomes more and more helpful.
This type of AI is context-rich, and meets you where you are. It knows which tools you use, how you get things done and what you need to do your job. You don’t need anyone from IT or sales to implement it for you. You don’t need to train it. You can get started straight away and begin managing all your existing content, smarter.
Dash features
Dash’s ‘Universal Search’ enables you to search the way you think, and you can talk to it in the same way you’d chat to a colleague. Simply type in queries such as ‘green logo with the dragon on it’ or ‘latest fall photoshoot’, and Dash will find exactly what you’re looking for – regardless of filename or format. It can even find answers within meeting notes, voice notes or videos.
Dash is packed with other features, including ‘Stacks’, which handily group related files together. This means that when a graphic designer is working with a client, for example, they can group all the files related to their project together – be that chats, links, files or photos – and access everything in one easy to manage Stack. You can also ask questions specific to each Stack, like ‘how would you summarise the client’s feedback?’ and get useful and easy to digest answers.
Because Dash is built on the strong privacy and security principles Dropbox is known for, you can trust it with your most sensitive work. The ‘Protect and Control’ feature enhances security further, ensuring that sensitive data is viewed by the right people. That means screenwriters or filmmakers can easily control which files their client sees, and crucially, which they don’t. No more accidentally sharing that draft or unfinished file.
On top of that, there aren’t the privacy concerns you get with other AI tools. You retain ownership of all your content. Dropbox will never share or sell your data, and it won’t be used to train generative AI models.
As we mentioned before, ‘Dash Chat’ helps you to summarise, ask questions and create new material from scratch, powered by your existing content. You can ask questions like ‘what’s new in the latest dragon logo project?’ or ‘can you summarise the social media reporting from the past year?’
It’ll help you write new content too. A copywriter could repurpose one blog post into a series of posts for social media or newsletters, for example.
Meanwhile, ‘Dash Answers’, summarises long documents for you, freeing up time so you can focus on creativity. A photographer might find this particularly handy when dealing with contracts or NDAs.
Available on web, desktop and mobile and integrated seamlessly with apps like Slack, Canva, Miro, Hubspot and Teams, Dash is super-easy to set up and available wherever you need it, whenever you need it.
Dash x McLaren Formula 1 Team
Dropbox is one of the McLaren Formula 1 Team’s official technology partners, and the McLaren F1 Team worked as Dash’s design partners, helping it build a product that helps high-performing teams get ahead.
With over 1,200 employees around the globe, the McLaren F1 Team were the perfect test subjects for Dropbox Dash.
“In F1, you have to maximize efficiency to stay competitive,” Dan Keyworth, director of business technology at McLaren Racing, says. "With Dropbox Dash, we're now working smarter. Dash has the power to save us countless hours, and even days, previously spent searching for content.”
Dan gives the example of how the team might have details about an event stored in emails, with the schedule in Smartsheet and then some other information publicly available. “The ability to pull all of that together and summarise it seamlessly in one place – and in just seconds – is hugely beneficial for a team that’s focused on working faster, and more efficiently,” says Dan. “These insights are a game-changer for ensuring tighter security and better control over sensitive data.”
As the team is used to dealing with security threats, privacy and full control of content is key. Dash’s easy to use access permission controls make everything simple. Admins are able to view who can access each document and update permissions to multiple documents with just one click.
Dash has become invaluable to the McLaren F1 Team. It helps the marketing and social teams, enabling them to group together project-specific stats and find crucial content – from race footage to sponsorship proposals to driver shots – so they can give the fans the content they want, when they want it.
“McLaren F1 marketing teams use Dropbox Dash to quickly find and share the content fans crave – keeping social coverage fast, global, and always on pace,” says Louise McEwen, McLaren Racing’s chief marketing officer.
Dash is improving Dropbox
For existing users of Dropbox, Dash makes Dropbox even smarter. Because Dash learns from your existing content, you don’t need to start from scratch. And the more you use Dropbox, the better Dash understands you and your team. The result? Super-sharp search results, more relevant answers and useful insights that help you progress and free you up to be more creative.
And the good news doesn’t stop there. Dash’s most powerful features are now in Dropbox, meaning you get smarter search, intelligent organisation, time-saving summaries and contextual answers from everything you already have stored in Dropbox.
This new Dropbox experience is available now to a select group of customers, with a wider rollout coming early next year.
Your future with Dash
With Dropbox Dash you can find what you need using plain language, get answers about your work and make your content even easier to organise and share, while keeping everything secure. With Dash’s context-aware AI, you’ll have everything you need in one place. Your days of toggling between apps, searching for lost files or chasing feedback and revisions are over.
Learn more about Dash – and try it for yourself – at dropbox.com/dash
