Webee Discusses All Things IoT on DisrupTV Segment

Webee co-founder Cecilia Flores is continuing to share her expert insights on IoT and tech industry panels. In March she spoke with Protocol about low-code and no-code developer tools. This month, she appeared on Constellation Research’s DisrupTV program to discuss the combined power of AI with industrial IoT. 
Hosted by Constellation founder and chairman R “Ray” Wang and Salesforce chief digital evangelist Vala Afshar, Ceciia was also joined on the panel by Snehal Antani, co-founder and CEO of Horizon3.ai (discussing cybersecurity, AI, automated hacking) and Michael Saylor, chairman at MicroStrategy (discussing bitcoin). The panelists are each focused on their common goal of reducing the friction of digital transformation and making life easier for their customers through innovative products and business strategies. 

Reducing Friction Through Efficient, Intuitive Out-of-the-Box Solutions
Cecilia kicked off her part of the conversation by noting commonalities with the other panelists: Webee reduces friction for users by providing tools they can immediately use to access real-time information. This avoids the need to spend months on implementations and millions of dollars on software that generates information no one can act upon. Webee’s bottoms-up approach helps customers adopt new technologies that allow for more organic digital transformation within their organizations. She described how it took the onset of the pandemic for customers to really come to terms with the value of combining AI and IoT, since both technologies enable remote work and remote control of operations. IoT, explained Cecilia, is about much more than connecting sensors and extracting data. It’s also aggregating data from different sources and adding AI so customers can derive real-time insights and position machines to make decisions on their behalf.

Cecilia also noted that friction is reduced through the use of Webee’s no-code toolset, which negates the need for engineers and can be set up quickly. The toolset’s rapid deployment capabilities give customers flexibility to play around with its interface and customize dashboards, instead of confronting technological glitches and then wasting time worrying about troubleshooting. 

Reducing Friction Through Digital Transformation
In sharing his perspective on bitcoin, MicroStrategy's Michael Saylor honed in on why he considers bitcoin such a smart and strong investment for companies with excess cash on their balance sheets. He conceptualizes bitcoin as a digital savings account, but notes it is unique from a savings account in that it rapidly appreciates in value. This in turn leads to higher profitability, which has positively impacted MicroStrategy’s ability to invest in both its product line and its employees. He then segued into an overview of MicroStrategy’s latest business objectives, which include an acceleration towards complete digital relationships with clients and an acceleration towards cloud-based technologies. The general theme, said Michael, “is to take the friction out of the value proposition.” In a nutshell, this means reducing all the touchpoints typically required of potential customers who are interested in deploying a new product. 

Reducing Friction Through Disruptive Technologies
Horizon3.ai’s Snehal Antani believes the cybersecurity environment is broken. Modern-day vulnerability scanning tools can identify hundreds of problems, but of those problems only a couple are worth patching. On the cybersecurity penetration testing side, he has noticed vendors are only able to assess a small chunk of their customers’ environments. Leveraging AI-driven technology, he’s focused on creating tools that assess threats not just once a week or every couple weeks, but in a continuous manner. He’s also prioritized building out a team of employees that has a mix of offensive cyber expertise, machine learning and data science expertise and enterprise-grade SaaS expertise. In certain cases, Antani also believes humans are a bottleneck to patching cybersecurity vulnerabilities and can actually create greater friction for customers. One example he cited is an algorithm making 1,000 decisions per second about an attack entry point and a human defender making one decision per minute. Said Antani, “attackers have adapted to the point where humans are now the inefficiency on the defensive side.”

In closing out the conversation, Vala said that speed, personalization and intelligence are what is most important to customers in order to reduce friction and give them power. Agree? Disagree? We’re interested in your take on the panel discussion. Tweet us @WebeeLife or visit us on LinkedIn.