1. Introduction to Glean
Glean is the premier AI-powered enterprise search and knowledge management platform designed for modern organizations. In any company, employee data is scattered across dozens of isolated SaaS platforms like Slack, Google Drive, Salesforce, GitHub, Jira, and Confluence. Finding a specific file, project timeline, or client document can take hours of searching. Glean solves this problem by using advanced vector search and LLM reasoning to connect all company tools under a single search box. It crawls and indexes every document, email, chat thread, and ticket while respecting existing database access permissions. When an employee asks, "What is our Q3 travel policy?" or "Who is the owner of the API codebase?", Glean scans the entire enterprise ecosystem and provides a cited, natural language answer. By serving as an intelligent central knowledge hub, Glean significantly reduces time spent searching and boosts organizational alignment.
2. Who is Glean for?
Glean is built for enterprise employees, IT administrators, engineering departments, sales operations teams, and customer success managers. It is highly suited for large organizations with hundreds of employees where finding internal documents is difficult. It is also an invaluable tool for onboarding new hires, helping them find files and answers to company policies without pinging other team members.
3. Key Features & Capabilities
Unified Search Box
Search across Slack, Jira, Drive, Salesforce, and GitHub simultaneously from one interface.
Glean Chat Assistant
Converse with an AI that answers company questions based on internal documentation.
Permissions Guard
Guarantees that sensitive documents are only visible in search results to authorized personnel.
Employee Directory & Graph
Locate company specialists, project owners, and organizational charts automatically.
4. Core Benefits
Save Hours of Work
Reduce search fatigue, allowing employees to find files in seconds.
Accelerate Onboarding
Empower new hires to search and learn company structures independently.
Locate Internal Experts
Quickly find which developer worked on a specific codebase or customer account.
5. How does Glean work?
Glean works by integrating with company SaaS tools using secure OAuth APIs. It builds a semantic search graph of the organization, tracking relationships between documents, topics, departments, and employees. By employing custom natural language processing models, Glean interprets search intent, searches the index, and uses secure LLMs to summarize the findings. Crucially, Glean respects all original application permissions: if an employee does not have permission to view a document in Google Drive, that document will never appear in their Glean search results.
6. Primary Use Cases
Company Policy Lookup
Search and find employee benefits, travel policy files, and brand guidelines instantly.
Sales Asset Retrieval
Find the latest slide decks, pricing documents, and case studies for client pitches.
Engineering Bug Resolution
Search historical Jira tickets and Slack threads to resolve legacy API bugs.
New Hire Training
Let new employees ask Glean Chat questions about codebases and policies.
Pros
- Deep, secure search integrations across hundreds of popular SaaS platforms.
- Strictly respects original database and document access permissions.
- Natural language answer synthesis gives direct answers to complex queries.
- Acts as an onboarding assistant, reducing training times.
- Saves hours of search fatigue across scattered company tools.
Cons
- Requires enterprise IT setup and API configuration.
- Custom pricing model can be expensive for small startups or solo operations.
- Requires substantial internal company data to deliver maximum utility.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q. Is our company data secure in Glean?
Yes, Glean uses encryption at rest and in transit, complies with SOC 2 standards, and does not use company data to train public models.
Q. Does Glean respect file permissions?
Absolutely. Glean mirrors the exact permission structure of your source apps, ensuring users only see files they have access to.
Q. Can Glean search inside database systems?
Yes, Glean offers connectors for SQL databases, Salesforce, Jira, and custom REST API integrations.