News
Glean gave Microsoft Build and Google I/O a run for their money today with a raft of announcements and AI product launches at its inaugural Glean:GO conference in San Francisco. Not bad for a company that emerged from stealth less than four years ago.
CEO Arvind Jain kicked off the event by calling the current moment a turning point from AI delivering productivity gains to AI fundamentally changing how we work, with AI agents leading the change. Of note, however, is Jain's statement during the final session of the event: "It will take a few more years before agents get truly autonomous, before they start to go into fundamentally serious business processes and we as humans feel comfortable with agents running on their own."
Jain's keynote featured success stories from beta testers such as Booking.com as well as an (unintentionally) hilarious exchange with Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora about how to define AI agents (spoiler alert: they didn’t agree).
Arora was on stage to discuss one of the many new partnerships announced during the day. More on those in a bit.
Major Platform Expansions and New Offerings Announced at Glean:GO
Glean President of Product and Technology Tamar Yehoshua announced several significant developments for the platform centering around the general availability and expansion of the Glean Agents platform, first announced in February.
Glean Agents Platform Is Generally Available
With the general availability of Glean Agents, all customers now have the option to use natural language in the AI Agent builder to create an agent, or to build each step themselves. For those not up to the agent building task, the company introduced an AI Agent library pre-populated with over 30 quickstart agents for sales, engineering, personal productivity, deep research or structured query agents for specific platforms including Salesforce, Databricks and more.
Anyone taking the DIY approach in the AI Agent builder can pick from a library of hundreds of actions to get started.
Glean’s step-by-step approach to agent building allows customers to troubleshoot at a granular level and brings a new twist: users can mix and match different LLMs on a per step basis within a single agent to take advantage of the unique strengths of each model.
A debug option allows you to safely run an agent through its steps before setting it loose, providing insight into the input and output of each step, how it calls the LLM and more. This level of observability allows the person creating the agent to reason and give feedback on individual steps.
Glean Universal Model Key
The company also announced a universal model key, available today, to streamline access to multiple LLMs for customers. The key eliminates the complexity and cost of paying for individual keys across multiple providers and gives access to 15 leading LLMs across hyperscaler ecosystems such as Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI and Azure OpenAI.
Hosted MCP Server
Any agent published within the Glean platform can be published on a remote MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, but the company also launched a hosted MCP server so agents on other platforms can securely access Glean Search and Assistant or interact directly with Glean Agents.
Personal Graph for Individualized Context
Another notable move was the announcement of the “personal graph.” Knowledge graphs have become de rigueur in AI implementations, providing AI tools with some structure and context around relationships between people and concepts to support better results. Glean operates with a knowledge graph.
But the personal graph brings the context down to the individual level, pulling information from individual enterprise data, activity, conversations, workflows, projects, agents, actions, as well as across all the tools integrated with Glean. Within the context of building an AI Agent equivalent of a personal assistant, it's clear how this level of context could potentially help.
Glean Protect
Finally, Glean introduced a series of new security features to help businesses scale AI safely. The protection comes in three forms:
- Preventing AI-Specific Threats — Safeguards to stop prompt injection and jailbreak attempts.
- Reducing Sensitive Data Risks — Automatic detection and remediation of overshared sensitive data across the 100+ enterprise systems that Glean integrates with.
- Stronger Access Management — Granular controls to limit who can run, view or edit agents.
Glean Grows Through Partnerships
As mentioned above, Glean also devoted part of the day announcing new partnerships to strengthen the platform’s security, capabilities and reach.
Glean and Palo Alto Networks
The partnership brings new integrations between the Glean platform and Palo Alto Networks Prisma AIRS and Prisma Access Browser.
- Prisma AIRS is Palo Alto Networks’ AI security platform launched last month which promises to secure every aspect of an AI environment — think AI apps, agents, models, data — at every step including runtime security.
- Prisma Access Browser provides an AI-backed SASE-native (secure access service edge) browser to conduct search and knowledge discovery across the enterprise.
Glean and Workday
The Glean and Workday partnership allows customers of the two companies to have Workday Illuminate agents interact with Glean agents. What this could look like in practice is an employee working in Glean could ask the Glean agent to request time off without leaving Glean or an HR leader operating in Workday could pull an employee’s project assignments to reassign using the Glean agent.
Glean and Snowflake
The Glean–Snowflake partnership includes a new structured query agent specifically for Snowflake Cortex AI/Analyst, which enables users and Glean agents to query data stored in Snowflake using natural language. The integration aims to combine Snowflake's real-time analytics with Glean's enterprise knowledge to drive faster, more confident decisions.
Glean and Dell
Finally, Glean announced a partnership with Dell which brings the former’s platform onto the Dell infrastructure, meaning the Glean platform can be deployed on-premises. For heavily regulated industries such as healthcare or finance, an on-premises deployment provides an extra layer of security which may make AI adoption that much easier.
Final Thoughts
Jain started the event calling now a turning point, where we fundamentally rethink how we work. However, in the final section he acknowledged how hard it is to step back and reimagine our work given time constraints and workloads.
Webinar
Sep
25
CMS Briefing: A Live Look at What’s Next in AI-Driven Platforms
Learn how leading organizations are using AI‑driven tools to publish faster, personalize smarter and stay secure.
Register
Webinar
On demand
Ready or Not: How Data-First Organizations Are Unlocking Agentforce Potential
Learn how to cut through the noise, activate Agentforce and build a Salesforce AI strategy that actually delivers.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
AI in Customer Service: Faster Resolutions, Happier Customers
Don’t let rising demand burn out your team. See how to build a smarter, more resilient support org.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
From Hype to High-Impact CX Strategies That Actually Scale
Turn buzzworthy AI and outsourcing trends into measurable CX wins with fresh 2025 data.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Insights to Action Rethinking the Contact Center for Real Business Impact
Join our exclusive webinar to hear CX executives share their innovative strategies for transforming service delivery.
Watch Now
Webinar
On demand
Accelerating Healthcare Ops with AI
Sign up to see how your peers are putting AI to work — and making it stick.
Watch Now
Jain shared the approach he takes internally at Glean, which sets a quarterly goal for each team to bring forward one way they introduced AI into their workflows. Keeping the goals achievable and within the context of work helps build the habit and allows employees to see firsthand the value agents can bring.
