Box Inc. this morning announced that it has acquired Progressly Inc., a low-key startup focused on helping companies become more productive through automation.

The startup’s brand of automation is different than that of more familiar workflow tools such as IFTTT. Whereas the latter product and others like it are built to coordinate cloud services, for example by syncing appointments among a user’s calendar apps, Progressly focuses primarily on coordinating people.

The startup’s platform provides the ability to create workflows for standardizing activities that involve multiple employees within a company. These workflows may be set up via a mobile app that doubles as a task management hub.

A Progressly workflow might be built around, say, the reporting form used by a plant’s maintenance crew to log technical issues. The platform could be configured to notify the team lead if a staffer tags a problem as “severe” when they’re filling out the form in the Progressly app. The same automation features can be used to handle related tasks such as sending out signature requests.

The acquisition of Progressly will bolster Box’s existing automation capabilities. Last year, it launched a service called Relay that allows companies to create multistep workflows for coordinating the activities of their personnel. Box also provides integrations with a number of outside automation services.  

As part of the transaction, the 12-person Progressly team led by founder Nick Candito (pictured, left, with Box Chief Executive Aaron Levie) will join the ranks of the cloud storage firm. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Box Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel did, however, detail in a blog post that the Progressly team will “work to further empower our customers to use the metadata and intelligence investments we announced last October.” This refers to Box Skills, a set of artificial intelligence tools that can be used to extract details from multimedia and perform other advanced tasks.

The provider might be planning to develop some sort of new, AI-infused workflow engine designed to automate new aspects of companies’ operations. AI has certainly proven to be an effective means of easing the kind of repetitive, and fairly standardized, tasks that tools such as Progressly are built for.

Image: Progressly