Introduction

hi everyone can you hear me well first question all right um thank you very much for having me my name is jana and melinda reached out to me last week and asked if i could talk a little bit about what we're building at beams give a demo of our product talk about how we apply ai in the product and also a bit about or alternatively about how we envision or how we see AI, what role it plays in productivity.

And I decided to do a little bit of all of those topics. So I'll give you a quick intro into who we are, what we're doing, what we're building, demo the product and mention a few AI topics along the way.

What is BEAMS?

So at BEAMS, we're building an AI powered work intelligence platform. And I usually like to start any presentation with this screen and then ask the audience, does this desktop look familiar to you?

Yeah, I mean, I think the problem of using too many apps, quite a few open windows and tabs and notifications, a problem that many of us know and feel every day. We knew the number of tools that a company uses would be high, but that it's 130 on average, we were still quite surprised about that number.

And the problem of that is many faults. On the one hand, and you and I, we all experience that, we constantly switch between Windows and apps. We are more distracted than ever and it's always harder to focus. So that's an obvious productivity problem and issue that a lot of knowledge workers, people working on their computers experience every day.

We also realized though that it's not just for individuals, it's also a big problem for teams as workflows span multiple tools. Information is scattered, workflows are ineffective, so really affecting how teams work together as well.

The Problem BEAMS Solves

And lastly, and maybe the biggest problem of them all, it affects companies and their bottom lines, as nearly every company really overspends on SaaS tools. We see so many companies Spending for licenses or giving money on licenses, but not really utilizing them or using multiple tools for the same purpose And this is the problem.

We're tackling with beams when I talk about us That's Miri and myself where the co-founders Miri is originally from Turkey and moved to Berlin nine years ago and she is the tech brain and visionary behind everything we're building so actually She deserves this stage today much more than I do, but she's giving a podcast interview at the moment.

Yeah, she has worked for the last 14 years in different engineering roles, built and scaled apps that were used by millions of people, was head of engineering at Unumotors before we started BEAMS. And for my background, I have a product background, worked in several product management roles.

And so we make a tech and product co-founding team and are solving a problem that or this problem that I just described. We are experiencing it on all of these three levels individually as team leads and now also running our own company.

BEAMS Solution

So what do we mean with work intelligence or what does our product actually do and what can it do? We're aiming to build a platform that helps, again, these three layers, individuals, teams, and companies to understand and manage productivity, workflows, and tools.

That sounds like a lot, but the vision is that big because we believe it needs to be solved on a holistic view and not just as a vertical solution. What we're building is a, we call it meta layer.

1We integrate with different tools that you use on a daily basis and building this layer on top to really understand how work is happening throughout those different tools.

Applying AI in BEAMS

And maybe this is a moment where I can talk a bit also about how we envision and apply AI. It's maybe a bit of a contrarian perspective to many others where we are not yet automating workflows already.

We see so many products, tech teams that are focused 90% on automating individual tasks at hand. We think there's a step before that, which is helping people understand their workflows.

We noticed that knowledge workers are not the best at actually describing their work or understanding their work and their workflows. And as AI currently, many AI agents are based on chat. I think we all have experienced that the results are sometimes really good, but not always.

So 1we believe that we are providing value by first helping individuals and teams understand how work is happening, understand their workflows, help them save money through that, and then automate later down the road. And nonetheless, there are multiple AI elements already now in our product.

But the big vision is really to build this work intelligence platform that collects all of this information. And AI is pretty good at making sense of complicated data sets. So really use that to detect patterns, generate insights, and give recommendations and suggestions on how to improve workflows and then only later down the road also automate workflows.

Product Demonstration

Now how does that look in practice? And this is actually where I want to switch to also show you what the product is doing.

We first started to build a productivity app for individuals that guides the user through the day from the top of the screen. It's cut up here, but you can imagine that this is where we live in the menu bar. And it's a product that is navigatable with shortcuts, but you can also click on it.

And the idea is that in the beginning of the day, in the morning, you open your Beams menu, you see your daily events. You prioritize your goals of the day and you can start a focus time for it, which blocks notifications, which sets your Slack status to focusing and already blocks your calendar. So your colleagues will know that you're busy.

So already here, we are making sure that these tools work a bit better together. And then you can check things off when you're done with them. and at the end of the day do a little reflection on and see how much time you spend in meetings versus focus time, if you achieved your goals and you can write down a little reflection.

Step One: Mindful Productivity

So this is actually what we call mindful productivity, helping individuals not just work always faster and better, what we see a lot in the productivity space, but more mindfully, one thing after the other, more focus, less distraction. So this was step one in our product development journey.

Step Two: Calendar Health Check

Step two is when we started really looking at the data that we are capturing from the tool integrations. So you can imagine from a calendar alone, there's already a lot of information and insights that you can learn about how individuals and teams spend their time. So we built what we call the calendar health check.

Step Three: SaaS Tool Insights

And now we can go to step three, where we identified that with this meta-layer approach and looking at the different tools, there is a use case with a much clearer ROI, which is not just about increasing productivity, but also helping companies reduce costs. And that's what we call SaaS tool insights.

So as a company admin, you can sign up here, and you get an automatic overview of all tools that are used in your organization.

So we are six team members, we already use 66 apps. So you can imagine if companies with hundreds or thousands of employees, how many tools they would be using.

You get this overview of all apps, you see who's using them, you can click into them, so our own app, some activity data, What permissions, what are you sharing actually with those tools to really give different roles in a company the ability to understand where are we overspending? Do we see any security risks here because we are sharing sensitive data with tools that are not really known? And lastly, how can we increase tool adoption across the whole company?

So an example, one of our clients, they said, hey, we would actually like everyone in our company to use ChatGPT, but we don't know if they do or not. And if they don't, why not? Maybe there's some education missing. We could offer workshops.

So that's a bit the vision that we follow here with these SaaS tool insights. So all of these three product dimensions all play into this work intelligence vision.

Future Vision and Conclusion

Before I close, because I think that's mostly what I wanted to share, maybe two more sentences on how we use AI for these tool insights as well. So already now we categorize all the tools that we detect. pre-write or we let AI write short descriptions of those tools.

And we will also use it going forward to get spend overviews and understand are there tools with like duplicate tools with overlapping features? Are there licenses of individual employees that are not being utilized or underutilized? Are the licenses we pay for really worth the investment?

And really give insights here, analytics, predictive analytics is also something we envision, so really help people understand how much they will be spending, how is this changing, and mostly where they can save money in their SaaS tool usage.

So there are different stages of how productivity apps generally have evolved recently or how we see this. It started with simple to-do lists. It became much more advanced with collaboration tools, multiplayer tools. Then we saw this next generation of super calendar apps where you can drag a to-do into the calendar and we thought this was a big innovation that every to-do is planned in your calendar.