Glean

What is Glean?

Glean is an enterprise AI search and work automation platform. It connects to business applications such as Google Drive, Microsoft 365, Slack, Salesforce, Jira, ServiceNow, and other workplace systems, then makes that information available through search, conversational answers, research tools, and agents.

Its central purpose is to help employees find and use company knowledge without manually checking multiple applications. Glean can retrieve documents, messages, records, and other information while preserving the permissions configured in the connected source systems. This makes it different from a public search engine or a general-purpose chatbot that does not automatically have access to an organization's internal context.

How employees use Glean

The most common starting point is enterprise search. A user can look for a document, conversation, project record, subject-matter expert, or other piece of workplace information across connected applications. Glean's assistant can also answer natural-language questions and provide references to the source material used for the response.

For example, an employee might ask about an internal policy, request a summary of project discussions, prepare for a meeting, or compare information from several company documents. The value depends heavily on which sources have been connected and whether their permissions and content are configured correctly.

Research and document analysis

Glean supports document and file analysis, including summarizing, comparing, and extracting information from supported files and connected content. Its research workflows can gather and synthesize information from company sources and, where enabled, the web. This is useful for preparing internal reports, investigating an operational question, or assembling background for a customer, sales, or support interaction.

These functions are closer to source-grounded enterprise research than to unrestricted web browsing. Users should still check the cited material, particularly when the underlying documents are outdated, incomplete, contradictory, or subject to complicated permissions.

Agents and workflow automation

Glean's broader distinction is that it extends enterprise search into configurable agents. Organizations can build reusable agents in Auto or Workflow modes, give them instructions and approved knowledge sources, and connect them to tools that can perform actions.

Depending on the deployment, an agent may research a topic, draft a response, prepare a report, send a message, update a record, or coordinate steps across connected systems. Agents can also be triggered by supported events or scheduled to run repeatedly, enabling recurring digests, reports, and operational workflows.

This makes Glean relevant to teams that want governed automation around existing business applications, not just an internal question-answering interface. Administrators control identity, permissions, connectors, models, tools, and other aspects of the environment. The practical results therefore depend on implementation and governance as much as on the conversational interface.

Connectors, integrations, and access

Glean provides a broad connector catalog for workplace services, including Google Drive, Gmail, Google Calendar, Microsoft 365, OneDrive, SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, Slack, Salesforce, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk, Confluence, Notion, GitHub, GitLab, Asana, Box, Dropbox, Zoom, HubSpot, Intercom, Workday, Tableau, and Power BI. The precise behavior of a connector can differ: some provide indexed content, some provide live tools, and others support a hybrid approach.

Custom connectors and REST APIs are available for organizations with systems that are not covered by standard integrations. Glean also documents MCP support, embeddable search and agent experiences, webhooks, and customer-key options. These capabilities are primarily relevant to technical and administrative teams integrating Glean into an existing enterprise environment.

Users can access Glean through the web, macOS and Windows desktop applications, iOS and Android apps, and browser extensions for supported browsers. Availability of individual features depends on the organization's tenant, identity configuration, contract, administrator settings, and rollout status.

Models and enterprise controls

Glean supports model and provider choices that can include OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, Amazon models, Glean's Waldo model, and open models made available through providers such as Fireworks and Baseten. Exact availability varies according to hosting environment, administrator configuration, provider access, and whether the organization uses its own keys.

Enterprise controls are a core part of the product. Glean supports SSO through OIDC and SAML, role-based administration, auditability, model selection, and permission-aware access to connected content. Its security materials describe encryption, customer-controlled deployment options, SOC 2 Type II, ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 42001, GDPR, and HIPAA-related commitments. Organizations should evaluate the applicable agreement and deployment configuration rather than treating these general commitments as a substitute for their own security review.

Privacy and data considerations

Glean is designed to mirror permissions from connected applications, so users should generally see only information they are authorized to access. That protection depends on accurate identity, connector, and permission configuration. Misconfigured source permissions or incomplete governance can affect the quality and safety of results.

Glean's documentation states that customer data is not used for model training or testing under the organization's agreement and that it uses models with a zero-day retention policy. The exact terms can vary by customer agreement, deployment, model provider, and customer-key configuration. Retention also depends on configuration and applicable agreements. In particular, uploaded file content and metadata may remain in chat history while the relevant session is retained, and the research indicates that custom file-upload retention policies are not supported beyond configured chat-history retention.

Pricing and availability

Glean uses custom enterprise pricing rather than a publicly advertised self-serve subscription price. A continuing public free plan or standard public free trial was not verified. Costs and usage economics may vary by users, deployment, connectors, models, agent activity, and contract terms.

Glean also documents FlexCredits for agent runs. Consumption can be affected by agent complexity, connectors, execution steps, tools, memory, and selected models. Organizations evaluating the platform should therefore ask for pricing and usage details that match their intended connectors and automation workloads instead of assuming that all features have a simple per-user price.

Who should consider Glean?

Glean is best suited to mid-market and large organizations with information spread across many business applications. It is particularly relevant to IT, operations, support, sales, HR, knowledge-management, and administrative teams that need a governed AI layer over internal company data.

• Strong fit: Organizations seeking permission-aware workplace search, cited internal answers, cross-system research, and configurable business agents.
• Potential fit: Teams that already use multiple systems and are prepared to invest in identity, connector, permissions, security, and workflow configuration.
• Weak fit: Individuals and small teams seeking an inexpensive personal chatbot, a public web search product, or a simple writing assistant.
• Important limitation: Search and automation quality depends on the connected sources, their permissions, administrator configuration, model availability, and the quality of the workflows built around them.

How Glean differs from adjacent AI tools

Compared with a general-purpose assistant such as ChatGPT, Glean is centered on an organization's governed knowledge and business systems rather than primarily on an individual conversation space. Compared with a workspace assistant such as Notion AI, its scope is intended to span many enterprise applications and support organization-level connectors, permissions, agents, and actions.

Glean is also more than an internal search index. Its assistant, research features, APIs, and agents can turn retrieved company context into drafts, analyses, scheduled outputs, or approved actions. That broader scope brings more implementation work and makes administrator controls and deployment choices central to the evaluation.

Bottom line

Glean is a serious enterprise platform for finding, understanding, and acting on information distributed across workplace systems. Its strongest use cases combine permission-aware search and cited answers with document analysis, internal research, and agents that automate repeatable workflows. The trade-off is that it requires an organization-level deployment, custom commercial terms, careful data governance, and a realistic assessment of connector and workflow quality.