With organizations and businesses across the world creating huge amounts of data like never before, the need for systems to manage and oversee this has never been greater.
Dropbox has been a common presence in homes and offices for many years, with its suite of products offering a reliable way to store, transfer, and manage files - but to help users manage this huge mountain of growing data, the company launched Dash, a universal AI search tool.
Since the launch of Dash for Business in 2024, the company has been working hard with its customers to refine and evolve the product, and perhaps no customer has been more involved than McLaren F1. I went to interview Dropbox CEO Drew Houston to find out more on just how the reigning Formula 1 Constructors’ World Champions have helped shape the company’s flagship AI platform.
Time to Dash
You’re probably all aware of Dropbox and how its core offerings work, as the company has been around since 2007 - but Houston notes that not long ago, the company was going through a "generational transition" which required not just an evolved brand and product portfolio (with Dash taking center stage), but also a major shift in how its customers thought about it.
"We knew we had this new product, and we were thinking about some new ways to really help educate our customers and the public,” he tells me at the sumptuous McLaren Technology Centre in Woking, UK, that "on the one hand, you might be familiar with Dropbox, but maybe just as, oh, its storage, or its files - so we looked at how we shift awareness and perception of Dropbox."
The company had been aware of the massively rising popularity of Formula 1 as a whole, with the growing global audience from Netflix showing the sport is enjoying what Houston calls, "a massively rising tide".
Having spoken to a few teams, he notes that McLaren, “was just very forward-leaning in terms of their adoption of technology," adding "I also really admired the culture of the team, and their focus on excellence, and to this day, find it amazing how they do what they do."
"Part of it was the excellence of the team - but McLaren really goes all-out with their partners in what we need as a business,” he says, noting the team has been some of the most enthusiastic early adopters across the entire Dropbox portfolio.
"We're very clear that we only partner with the best brands in the world,” Dan Keyworth, Director of Business Technology, McLaren Racing, explaining how there is a “thorough need” for the tools offered by Dash across the team.
He tells us how the team is using a range of Dropbox tools, from DocSend for traditional file transfer, to Replay for its digital and social media tools, to Dash for connecting up the data across the business.
Keyworth outlines how, with teams often spread across the globe at a far-flung race weekend, the need for having all the right data at your fingertips, across all technology tools, is vital.
"The sport is trying to get more out of what you've already got - it's not about making the ship heavier, it's about being more efficient and extracting more performance from the team,” he says.
"I don't think there's another product that's doing it, or doing it as well as what you get with Dash.”
Universal problem
"The problem Dash solves is universal - every company needs to connect the right information to the right people at the right time,” Houston explains, showing me a demo on his smartphone, demonstrating how Dash can quickly track down even very specific information on our meeting, and other appointments he has coming up.
He notes if this can then be rolled out across a large organization with thousands of workers, the productivity savings could be enormous, especially as AI-powered search can cut out huge amounts of time previously spent manually searching for information.
I also got a look at Dash assistant, an AI tool which analyzes and learns from the user over time, to gain the ability to create emails or messages mirroring a user’s exact tone of voice.
Houston notes that in a public-facing business like McLaren, there will be guidelines on brand style or voice, but with so many workers producing content, it's important to ensure consistency by encoding requirements - but notes that Dash’s responses are a bit less corporate and bland than those created by ChatGPT.
“Customers like McLaren really helped us,” he laughs, “they’re much more demanding on these fronts, and so I think we were able to get up the learning curve a lot faster, and bring a much more battle-hardened product to market.”
"McLaren is an organization that lives or dies by the millisecond, so it's vital to have the right information at everyone's fingertips when you have 150 people trackside, another thousand back at HQ...in the most challenging environments we could subject the product to."
“Putting the product through its paces early means that, if it can meet McLaren’s needs for excellence and speed and reliability and security, then it’s going to work for a lot of other customers too.”
Houston mentions McLaren’s need for extra control over just which workers in an organisation are accessing specific data on certain platforms as a specific example of what can be expanded to other users.
He adds that Dash is unique in its protect and control capability, which allows companies to identify and remediate potentially content which shouldn’t have been shared - which is an important consideration when using AI tools at work, as well as establishing policies globally across every app in a business without the need to manually configure each one.
“I think there’s a lot of hype about AI,” Houston says, “but where is AI really translating that productivity, and the incremental revenue, and making your business stronger?”
“This is where Dropbox is strong,” he adds, “we started the company back in 2007, when cloud was still a buzzword everybody had heard about…but there was this disconnect between what people were talking about in their real life - and we see the same thing with AI - what company isn’t making these grand proclamations and promises?”
“We see Dash as going the last mile to really bring AI to work in a common sense and cross-platform way, and solve these problems we all have dozens of times a day.”
“Dropbox’s role is really shifting from syncing files to really being this intelligence layer for your whole working life…this is what we do - and for a lot of our customers, Dropbox just works. Companies are already trusting us for their most important information in terms of their files, but now we can help with everything else, bring it together in one place and then connect the dots.”
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