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

Dropbox built custom AI infrastructure (Dash, search) because its 700M-user scale broke off-the-shelf tools, while battling "context rot" in LLM outputs.

• Dash connects fragmented work data: Dropbox's Dash product indexes Dropbox files plus third-party sources (Salesforce, Slack, email, Notion, Confluence) into a unified searchable, chattable interface via user-authorized connectors.
• Scale forced build-over-buy: Dropbox operates over 700 million users and tens of exabytes of data, prompting it to build its own search engine and parts of Dash when off-the-shelf tools couldn't handle that scale.

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