Aaron Levie and Annie Pearl of Box — speaking at the company’s user conference, BoxWorks — have laid out an ambitious vision for the company’s future, going way beyond file sync-and-share and productivity tools.

The company announced Box Workflow, which is a means to define and run business processes on top of new capabilities related to Box’s acquisition of Dloop last November. These processes might be financial (like invoicing and payment), operational (like contract management), or general (like digital asset management).

Box for Industries is intended to tailor these workflow services to the needs of specific industries, like retail, education, construction, and so on.

I understand that Box needs a larger vision, but I wonder if the model of formalized, rules-based workflow will be enough. Perhaps Box will push the meaning of workflow beyond its 1990’s roots, to include algorithmic and AI support, and the intersection with big data-style approaches to analytic understanding of the information latent in all the documents that people are creating and sharing.

We are in a time when more work is becoming non-routine and cognitive (see Work is rapidly becoming nonroutine and How many of today’s jobs could be computerized? A whole lot.). Many refer to the rapid decline in routine cognitive work as the ‘hollowing out’ of the workforce, as diverse roles —  like clerical workers, paralegals, and X-ray technicians — are being displaced by better, smarter software.

So, on one hand Box may be aspiring to be that better, smarter software — organizing documents, routing forms, ensuring that regulations are followed — and freeing up worker’s time to do other things. But on the other hand, simply allowing the definition of static rules-based workflows won’t be enough for today’s business, because the key basis of competition has become rapid innovation in business operating models. Box will have to develop these new capabilities to be much more flexible and dynamic than the workflows of old.