Employees can spend up to one-third of their time looking up information in the company, and until now enterprise search has not been up to snuff.

That looks to change with Glean Technologies Inc.’s artificial intelligence-based enterprise search tool. With this product, users will have all of a company’s data at their fingertips, based on its unique governance model, according to Arvind Jain (pictured), founder and chief executive officer of Glean.

“Enterprise search has always been an unsolved problem,” Jain said. “Not all information can be seen by every employee in the company. When you actually build a search product, you have to actually deeply understand the governance model of your data, make sure that when somebody comes and searches for information, they only get to see results to things that they actually have permissions for. Then, if you think about just how enterprises are organized, you have hundreds or sometimes thousands of applications and systems.”

Jain spoke with theCUBE Research’s John Furrier at the Media Week NYC: theCUBE + NYSE Wired 2024 event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Glean is solving the enterprise search problem with AI.

Why enterprise search is a different beast

One of the issues with enterprise search is that it has to gather data from many different applications and products. A customer can authorize Glean to connect with the company’s different systems so the product can then build a search index that allows employees to interface with all of the company’s data.

“You’ll have products from Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Atlassian, and many, many more,” Jain said. “We’re seeing this interest from many platform companies — they want to actually be that know-it-all AI assistant inside the company. If you think about Glean, that’s what our product is … we focus on integration, then we focus on search and AI and making sure that we can utilize all of that information to actually answer questions — and actually help our customers actually build many more AI applications.”

The company has built thousands of integrations with different products to support successful retrieval-augmented generation, although the customer has to do the work of ensuring their data is not obsolete or improperly protected within the system. If the information is made available, the AI search will find it.

Glean’s AI tool is the gateway to infusing AI throughout the company, Jain pointed out. The product functions as a kind of AI assistant for the user, helping them navigate the company network.

“Glean is the fastest way for an enterprise to embrace AI internally,” he said. “AI transformation is potentially bigger than digital transformation that enterprise. Our promise to them is that you can come to Glean, and you can ask any question, and we’ll use all of your internal company’s private knowledge, in a safe way, of course, to answer that question for you. You can give us a task, and it’ll actually also complete that task for you, whether it requires taking actions in some of your other applications or creating some artifacts. It’s a big promise that we’re making.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of the Media Week NYC: theCUBE + NYSE Wired 2024 event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE