Connecting Data at Scale With AI: Dropbox's Ali Dasdan

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Connecting the dots between data sources across your organization to enhance productivity sounds promising, but how does it actually work? Find out on today's episode.

Ali Dasdan (0:13)

I am Ali Dasdan at Dropbox, and you are listening to Me, Myself, and AI.

Sam Ransbotham (0:19)

Welcome to Me, Myself, and AI, a podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review, exploring the future of artificial intelligence. I'm Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Austin College. I've been researching data, analytics, and AI at MIT SMR since 2014, with research articles, annual industry reports, case studies, and now 13 seasons of podcast episodes.

In each episode, corporate leaders, cutting-edge researchers, and AI policymakers join us to break down what separates AI hype from AI success.

Today, my guest is Ali Dasdan, Chief Technology Officer at Dropbox. Most people know Dropbox as a place to store and share files. Now, Dropbox connects organizational knowledge to AI and gives teams a landing spot to review, collaborate, and advance their work. What I find interesting about Ali is the path that he took to get here. He started in chip design, moved to web search, and now technology at a 20-year-old company. I think he's unusually straight about what AI can and can't do. Let's get into that some. Ali, thanks for coming today.

Ali Dasdan (1:30)

Happy to be here, Sam. Thank you for inviting me.

Sam Ransbotham (1:32)

Of course. Let's start with the quick version. What does the CTO of Dropbox actually do every day?

Ali Dasdan (1:38)

Multiple things. Definitely setting the, you don't do it every day, but setting the technology vision of the company. There's a big team that I manage, product development, responsible for platform and security and IT and all aspects of that. Day in, day out, it's always busy.

Issues come up, product updates, sometimes incidents happen. There are exact team discussions that are happening weekly.

It's not the same every day, but very busy.

Sam Ransbotham (2:05)

I got familiar with Dropbox years ago, starting synchronizing files. I admit that I constantly, it's a fundamental part of how I work in keeping all my machines in sync.

But up to now, I haven't seen a lot of artificial intelligence in that history of that project. So tell me about Dash and how that works, and what you're thinking there.

Ali Dasdan (2:25)

That's true. I mean, Dropbox being a file-sharing site and storage site, it's very fundamental to so many different businesses, especially in the businesses that deal with lots of media files, for example, construction companies or advertising companies or creative space and all. I think with the rise of Gen.AI, there was a focus on bringing AI to solve our customers' problems, and Dash started with that.

A very simple example is you talk to one of these customers, they have a huge number of videos that they have stored. They have difficulty organizing them, difficulty to find what they are looking for. It's not only sometimes finding the video, but finding a certain frame within a video.

Now with Gen.AI, actually, many of these problems have simplified, and we ended up actually bringing with Dash those kinds of capabilities. Then this is basically for the content on Dropbox, but going beyond that, we realized basically our customers need, when they do search or their work, they need far more than their Dropbox context, they need their whole work context. As a result, Dash also has capability to connect to third-party data sources, bring all that content in a way that it's all accessible through the same interface for searching, for chatting, for question and answering, etc. Now we are incorporating it into more and more of our product, hopefully very soon most of our users or all of our users will have access to it.

Sam Ransbotham (3:55)

It brings up an interesting problem that, speaking personally, so much of my content is within that platform.

But like you say, there's a lot of stuff that is inherently not file-based and not in that platform. I feel like I see a lot of people in the ecosystem right now trying to get at that cohesive look of all the data across all kinds of different products. Tell me how that's going to play out. It seems like it's a little bit of a scramble with everybody trying to make this connection for us.

Ali Dasdan (4:27)

Yeah. First of all, it's a very difficult problem. Anybody in a company, let's say there are users, they access so many third-party platforms.

They have, let's say, sales data and sales force. They are using Slack. They have email. They have either a notion or confluence or things like that for documentation, etc. It's also very ambitious to claim that we have a single place to collect all that information and serve. But in a way, with Dash, we got close to that because in the end, our users are actually dealing with that kind of context. What happens is basically as long as you connect these data sources, users have to agree and they have to initiate that.