- Glean has launched tools for building and managing digital agents that carry out tasks on their own.
- The company faces competition from Google, Snowflake, and Dropbox in enterprise search.
- Glean’s new features include agent libraries and real-time internet search.
Glean is going all in on digital agents.
The enterprise software unicorn on Wednesday unveiled a new suite of tools for businesses to build, deploy, and manage digital agents. The company continues rolling out new products in the face of competition from Google, Snowflake, Dropbox, and others.
Glean’s service lets employees query all their enterprise data. It tunnels through the customer’s various systems and applications at unbelievable speeds and summarizes the findings.
The company has been testing new reasoning capabilities for several months with a select group of customers. It’s now releasing some of those features widely.
Employees can describe a task using plain language, and Glean parses the prompt into smaller tasks and takes steps to achieve the desired outcome. For example, an employee can tell the Glean chatbot, “prep for my one-on-one with Tina.” Glean blasts through their shared emails, Slack messages, Google Docs, Figma files, and other sources to suss out what topics should be addressed and then writes an agenda for the meeting.
The employee can save this “agent,” basically a set of instructions, to their workspace and recall it at any time. They can also configure the agent’s settings to run ahead of every one-on-one with Tina and drop a link to the agenda in the calendar event.
Emrecan Dogan, Glean’s head of product, said the company has just begun to deliver on the promise of what agents can really do.
“Your agents are working for you while you are asleep,” Dogan told Business Insider on a call earlier in the week.
Founded by a team of former Google search engineers, Glean began its life as “Google search for businesses.” The rub is that Google has since entered that space. It’s made numerous upgrades to the Google Cloud platform, enabling developers to build search into their applications. The Information reported in November that Google is preparing to launch a new enterprise search product to compete directly with Glean’s.
The new agent environment is part of Glean’s strategy to offer more powerful software features to customers as it faces mounting competition. The company said last week that it crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in the 2024 fiscal year.
On the call with Business Insider, Dogan demonstrated other use cases that leverage Glean’s latest release. He prompted the chatbot to prepare a table comparing Glean to Candian rival Coveo for a sales call. In seconds, it combed internal data sources and searched the web to prepare the table, all while showing on-screen the steps it took in real time.
The new release also includes an agent library designed to help workers get started with pre-built agents. Employees can share custom agents with their teams so workers don’t waste precious time if, Dogan said, “somebody spent the brain cycles to come up with a better agent.”
