Dropbox is launching two different but related AI-powered services into its platform. The first is simple and obvious: a tool for summarizing and querying documents. This is neat and useful and the sort of feature you’ll see in most tools in this category over time.
The other thing Dropbox is launching is much more ambitious and interesting. It’s a universal search engine that can access your files in Dropbox but also across the entire web. It’s called Dash and comes from Dropbox’s 2021 acquisition of a company called Command E. The idea behind Dash, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston tells me, is that your stuff isn’t all files and folders anymore, and so Dropbox can’t be, either. “What used to be 100 files or icons on your desktop,” he says, “is...