Jovan Strika of ElastaLink shares an early look at a private AI business desktop from @Hive. Why connected apps come before AI, and what it means for SMB owners tired of app overload.
GROWTH PILLAR: AI & Automation
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners, solopreneurs, and leaders building systems
WHAT THEY’LL GAIN: A clear view of why disconnected SaaS tools hold AI back. A look at one way to bring apps, data, and private AI into one place. Questions to ask before you add another tool.
Most owners think AI will fix their app mess. It won’t, not on its own. Until your apps connect, AI only gives you average answers, not answers about your business.
Too many business apps hold a piece of your data, and none of them talk to each other.
Jovan Strika, Chief Vision Officer at ElastaLink, shares an early look at what @Hive is exploring. Most business owners run on many SaaS tools that don’t connect. They copy and paste data and settle for features they didn’t pick. Jovan walks through a web-based business desktop that brings AI applications into one place, with tiles, windows, a dock, and saved views. One private AI assistant works across all your data. You can even ask it to build your own AI apps. It runs on a private cloud or on-prem, so your business data stays yours. He ends by asking the room what belongs on the wish list. This is for owners who want simpler business operations and are curious about private AI.
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Hosts: Percy Barr and Wayne Pratt
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Jovan Strika (00:05)
before
I start with the demo and kind of show you a little bit of experimental innovations that we start working on, that soon we will be introducing under the At Hive brand. but
maybe starting with the comment which is disconnected applications. We all are victims of you know leveraging many applications for our work, and a lot of them are cloud based. They're what are called software as a service. It's a service that you sign up, there's a subscription, they do a job for you, you actually place your data, you store something, but it is sitting
isolated in most of the cases and not connecting to the other apps. So what you end up doing is very often copy pasting or having multiple duplicates of your information on many different apps. let's say you have a QuickBooks online where your customers are, but then you have a marketing application, mailing list like a MailChimp or maybe a Hubspot like a CRM, and that customer record
lives in all of them almost. And how you keep that in sync, that's kind of one of the challenges. And then the other aspect are these applications good? Because generally as a provider you need to create an app that sort of tries to accommodate majority of your users. And that's something that I felt was quite wrong because in often when you think about it how you want to operate, every business
professional had to make compromises to use the applications in the way that they're designed rather than actually having applications designed the way they need it. And a part of this challenge is start now eliminating by creating a custom applications. And we are seeing more and more AI now being capable to actually not only
clone the applications that you might be able to use locally, but also being able to adapt to the way you work. there's a several interesting podcasts that are talking about, you know, here is a application that has a 20 30 features, but reality is that most of the people are using only 20% of this. And how you actually then choose between the two different, let's say, email clients or your to do list or your note taker.
Because you have to make a compromise between to go one or the other, but some of them have one feature set and the other one and the other. So you're always kind of often in a constant search about what is the right app. I can only imagine how often I actually change my to do list app. and almost felt that I'm actually doing more work of finding the better to do than actually doing the work that is on my task list. So this is the part where
now entering a very new era where things are start changing and we're getting already preview of ability to understand better what business professional needs, but there was really lack of flexibility to create this environment of the work according to how you would like to operate. And what we are started
working on through the At Hive is establishing these conversations. And this is where being able to actually have that conversation about what people need, what is the problems that they're trying to face, and translating this into sort of technical requirements, it's not easy. working with the AI and building custom application for the businesses.
And very often that communication between what somebody needs and translating into actually developing something, it's a challenge and takes a lot of time to actually translate this. So we're we kind of look into all of this a bit of challenges and thought about it. What is the what we think is the future of a business environment that people can operate with. And with the AI
we start seeing very interesting capabilities but a lot of people don't understand how AI can help them. often is, you know, in front of the screen and said, what should I do next? And in order for it to be helpful, it needs information. So it depends from the users to provide the questions and typically it goes and provides this sort of a knowledge that is average knowledge between all the different people.
but not really custom to you and your business and your problems. So we were looking how we can in the future see that all of this coming back to these connected applications, that all they have a piece of data. What if these data and applications are on one spot? And if you have a something that receives your emails or your chats
or even your phone calls or video calls transcription, these are all such a valuable data that actually AI can understand better about your business and then really start being helpful with the suggestions or providing a context that you would be really surprised. And that's where we start thinking about it. What if we can consider as a next way of working is creating an environment that gives you the access in one spot.
With multiple business applications. but that also created a different problem, which is when you look at the some applications, they're very complex. You have a lot of menus on the side and you have a lot of functionalities and features. So think about it that suddenly if you have a you know dozen of these under one environment, that can be overwhelming. and also we see users being
expecting different functionality from day one versus once they become more advanced users. So how we achieve that kind of adapting to these business applications. So these are several problems that we identify and we start thinking internally from our research and development as what is potentially a future of business applications and how we can then merge all of these components and really provide a kind of one solution.
So what this is is a concept of what we call the internally, not yet productized, but as a kind of a business application desktop or almost feels like a operating system. And this is kind of merging familiarity that we all experiencing through using doesn't matter Windows or Mac. You have the kind of operating system where you're opening different applications. But what this is is
web-based and it's one single place where you can access different type of applications. What we're introducing is concept of something that is we're also all familiar with the mobile apps and tablets, kind of an apps concept. You are we're seeing this as a ways to introduce the different we call in tiles for your different business applications. For example, CRM
might have a tiles that opens companies, contacts, customers, opportunities, your financial application can open you know revenue, invoices, you can have a tiles for your email that you can read messages or chat to chat with your employees.
So a lot of these things are not yet brought in, but just these are a few example tiles as a concept that we're playing with. But the idea was that you basically bring what you need, and that shows up and as the window that you can use. That this is the kind of a floating window where opens different information and you can resize it, which in this case it really acts as what we all used to see.
But in addition to window mode, when you double click, you actually can have a full screen and full application focused on the type of the work you're doing. So this is two different modes, but what we introduce is also what we call dock. So when you're creating something, you can then take the specific window and bring it into the dock. So this dock is sort of a place temporarily that
Whatever records you are open on, you can then quickly dock them and then open when you're ready. Good example is the email applications. Every morning when I go through the emails, there was a bunch of emails, and I have to flag them, and I said these are the ones that need to come back and maybe reply or deal with this. But what this allows now is to be able to then create an open emails and then dock them and come back to them when you're ready.
These applications are created in a way that they have what they call the different state and it can show the information differently according to size. And that's a bit of a smart way of interaction where if it's a small tile, it shows just the hours and this is an example of just the time. but if I make it bigger,
It includes a seconds and differently present a date. If I go even further, it gives you more information. So this is an intelligent way to adjust to the interface that you have. And that's something that is working very well with the smaller devices. So the idea was that you don't compromise information, but it is in a smart way adjusting what you need. When I have a multiple applications, and you are
using them. If you take one and shake, it kind of docks the rest. Idea was to be able to quickly focus your work. But then this kind of layout we created in a way that you can save it is what we call the views. So on the left side we actually created a several views that are when you click on it it actually goes back to your environment to do your when you set up.
And for example, if you are now doing the email answering, that's something that maybe consume you know hour of your day. So idea was that you set up environment that you need with the applications and you can quickly switch between them. Now you're on the research, then now you're writing you know proposal for presentation or you're chatting with your team. Idea was to introduce this custom view that you can always update.
And then according to the type of the work, you can easily switch between them. Coming back to this customizing applications, this was very important to achieve something that increased productivity and at the same time also allowed you to quickly switch between the different types of the work. This is a one example, we have a list of people here where when you click on details.
It actually opens the information of that person. It's a very simple example of the CRM. But then when you click on a second one, it reloads and opens the different details of different customer, for example. But if we introduce something we'll call PIN, now this means that when I open a different client, it can show up as a different window and we can easily drop that window.
and move it where it needs to be. So this way you are really truly designing a user interface for the way applications means to you and then save it and customize it. This is a challenge with a lot of applications. They're very much set with in terms of their design and how things are and how information is presented, where often you don't need all the pieces, but they made it more generic, instead of being able to customize. So this concept of interaction is interesting because all of this data is now accessible with assistant that can be always brought as an application on the as a kind of AI chat. And this what we see is
a traditional AI interface where you can chat and ask questions and receive the answers. But the difference with this is that now all your data that you are using through the applications are accessible with the AI. Now you can choose how much you want AI to access it. But if you ask any question, it can interact with the
systems and the databases or applications that are storing your data. Or for example, in this case it's a like a file, like your drive. it's showing all your output of the AI. So if you say, you know, create me presentation that it will generate this presentation and save in sort of your drive, you can then share this with another team member and etc. So this is what
we believe is really the way how people will use AI, but what I want to highlight that all what you see is stored in our data centers. It's a private cloud. It's not open AI or Microsoft that can actually access your data and use for sharing and for training. And including the AI that we use is the private. So the privacy was paramount for us in security.
And what we're hoping that individuals and organizations who can who can afford having their own infrastructure, we could make that available what we called on-prem, being basically a beefy server sitting in your office and then it's completely your own rather than being in a cloud. It all depends of you know affordability, but the idea was that the system at the end can be completely customized to the business.
And for each employee a set of apps and also different access to the data that they have. and last thing I want to mention is that what we are also now introducing the ability to create your own applications. And that's a very early stage. But if you are looking for an app and it's not currently in, let's say
You have your favorite note taker. You can then point AI, ask to give a set of features. You can then adjust it and it can create application for you and store it in our business center. This is really the future where we believe that a lot of applications are going towards. And idea was instead of paying all of these different providers for small apps.
like a calendar, note taker, or Zoom and et cetera that we could introduce the apps and it's up to each individual to decide will they use something that is closely integrated or they would like to use the applications that they already are using. There's no need for transfer everything, but idea was to introduce the system that people can customize and build upon. so I will kind of stop here.
I would love to hear everybody's feedback. this is part of what we are working on exploring, so now it's a time to actually hear a wish list and we'll see what we can introduce as a part of the product that you will love. Thank you.