Enterprise search startup Glean launches generative AI assistant

Search engine developer Glean Technologies Inc. today introduced Glean Chat, an artificial intelligence assistant that can summarize business documents and generate text.

The startup says that the assistant, which is powered by generative AI models, is also capable of helping engineers with coding tasks.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Glean exited stealth mode in 2021 with $55 million from investors. The startup has since raised another $100 million for its namesake product, a search engine geared towards the enterprise market. The platform enables workers to sift through their company’s internal business data using natural language queries.

Glean Chat, the new AI assistant the startup debuted today, is also designed to help users quickly find information. It can collect business data from about 100 popular enterprise applications including Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 and Salesforce. Glean Chat provides the ability to interact with the retrieved business data through a ChatGPT-like interface.

Workers can use the tool to summarize recent business developments. A developer, for example, could ask Glean Chat to fetch information about a software update rolled out by colleagues. The AI assistant can not only specify whether the update was implemented successfully, but also fetch related technical details.

Each response that Glean Chat generates contains links to the business documents from which it sourced information. Additionally, the tool suggests follow-up queries. If a developer asks about a recent software update, Glean Chat might suggest searching for information about the next scheduled feature release.

Glean says its assistant can not only summarize individual events such as a software update but also entire datasets. A user could, for example, have the tool extract key details from a collection of feature requests submitted by customers in the past 30 days.

“Kicking off a new project can be difficult when there are so many moving pieces and sources of information to work with,” Glean co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Arvind Jain detailed in a blog post today. “Chat excels at getting you past that initial barrier by generating summarized insights from large volumes of enterprise data.”

Alongside its summarization features, Glean Chat includes a text generation capability. Workers can use it up for tasks such as answering common customer support requests. According to the startup, Glean Chat is also capable of generating software code.

Organizations limit access to sensitive business data for cybersecurity purposes. An accounting database, for example, might only accept login requests from members of the accounting team. Glean says that its AI assistant takes into account companies’ data access rules when generating answers and only fetches information relevant to a user’s work.

Glean’s installed base includes more than 100 enterprises. The startup counts major enterprise software makers such as Databricks Inc., Confluent Inc. and Okta Inc. among its customers.

Image: Glean