Glean

Glean, founded in 2019 by former Google and Facebook engineers, sits at the intersection of enterprise search and AI assistant. The core premise: knowledge workers spend an enormous fraction of their time looking for information that already exists somewhere in their organization's tool stack. Glean makes that information findable and actionable.

The product indexes content from 100-plus enterprise applications including Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, Salesforce, Jira, Confluence, GitHub, Zendesk, and more, and builds a unified semantic search layer on top. Employees type a natural language question and get ranked results pulled from across the connected apps.

As of 2024-2025, Glean expanded beyond search into a full AI assistant capability called Glean Chat. This allows employees to ask complex questions and get synthesized answers with citations, not just links to documents but actual answers drawn from them. Glean Chat can also take actions: draft emails, create Jira tickets, or update Salesforce fields based on conversation.

Security and permissions are central to Glean's design. The system respects access controls from each connected application. If a user does not have permission to see a Confluence page, they will not see it in Glean results or Glean Chat responses. This is a meaningful differentiator for enterprise procurement teams.

Glean also offers an AI Apps platform, letting organizations build custom chatbots and workflows on top of its retrieval infrastructure.

Pricing is enterprise-only, typically $15 to $25 per user per month depending on volume and features negotiated. Glean is not suitable for small teams or individuals; the minimum deployment is generally 100 or more users. The company raised $260 million at a $4.6 billion valuation in February 2024.

Primary competitors are Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 shops, Notion AI for teams centralized in Notion, and enterprise search incumbents like Coveo and Elastic.