Glean AI Chat's Rise: From Startup to $1 Billion Valuation

0:00On a recent podcast episode, I made the statement that a lot of the really successful AI applications and new projects that we're seeing right now are actually old ones that have been in the last year. you know, either they're finally launching or they're releasing some sort of AI integration that makes their product a lot more viable. Today on the podcast, I want to talk about one of those which I think is very interesting. It is called Glean. And what's interesting about Glean is while it kind of is coming on to the stage as being mainstream, it's already raised over$100 million and it has a billion dollar valuation.

0:34And that was a while ago that it did that. So I think it's pretty cool. I'm going to break down exactly what it does and why this is important for enterprises and how this is going to be beneficial. So I think essentially what this is, is originally it was just like a search bot for enterprises where it could search through enterprises data and help, you know, get answers for people that are querying them very quickly about a company in particular. But now with the advent of ChatGPT and the abilities that we have with AI, they've made this thing a lot more powerful and they have a, you know, a language input where you can ask questions in a lot more native manner and get a lot of really powerful responses.

1:14So what this really does is it gives you the ability to have really actionable insights and very precise answers for work-related questions around your company. So it can help you to analyze documents across Slack, Google Drive, Gmail, Office, and a bunch of others. It can then help you to compile all of the insights from that data and then it can answer your questions using internal information. So I think one thing that is really great about this company is that it makes sure it does not use your data to train its algorithm. Obviously, that is pretty critical for companies nowadays and even ChatGPT and OpenAI have products that help you do that, partnering with Microsoft Azure.

1:54So essentially, it's like ChatGPT, but it works across your entire internal organization with all the information that you have in your workplace so how it does this like i was mentioning is that this is able to connect to things like your company's slack your company's drive your company's gmail all of the different third-party softwares including your like salesforce that your company or a company might use it has all of that data integrated or collected through an api then you're able to query that data and they've done a couple really interesting things with that I mean, aside from just being able to kind of analyze this massive body of data, they've also made it so they're able to set permissions.

2:34So, you know, if only the CFO or the people in the finance department have access to or should have access to certain documents, you're able to set those permissions. So not everybody can go and get information and, you know, potentially leak or find out information about your company that they shouldn't. so i think what's really interesting is in in glean's kind of um in their demo they they have a bunch of examples so you can say something like you know what's going on with the nexa tech deal that was one of their examples and then it has this whole breakdown of what's going on you know with this one particular deal you can say you know has anyone that is working on that deal or has anyone from this particular deal uh submitted support tickets and you can see the support tickets they've submitted.

3:16Um, it's, you can say like, who is the point of contact on this particular deal? Who's the salesperson over there? Who's the person in charge of integrating blah, blah, blah. So you can really quickly get, um, and you can, uh, and you can also break this down by like, like, uh, number size. So it's like, you know, tell me, um, which company that uses us submits the most support, uh, tickets. And that is, you know, that is an account over like$250 ,000, right? Once it might be important to your organization and it can break down, break that down who they are, what their support tickets are, you know, connects to Jira and all that.

3:48So I think honestly, this is a really powerful tool because I'm coming as someone that, you know, my first job working at a corporation, there was a lot of time that I spent trying to figure out, you know, who was in charge of what at a company, where to find, where to access different files, getting caught up to speed. And I think this really brings down the entire onboarding process for people because any questions you might have about an organization who's in charge of what, what's going on with what deal, you can really quickly grab that information here and report it. And in addition to that, a lot of my first, you know, that job I mentioned, a lot of what I was doing there was working on, you know, like doing reports and looking at, you know, what was happening with sales data, what products were popular, what products were being used, what products were getting a lot of engagement on social media, et cetera, et cetera.

4:38And having something like this, where I could quickly query without having to download these massive spreadsheets or create, you know, complex pivot tail built tables and all sorts of things to extract the data. This is a very, very powerful tool, in my opinion. So I think it's this is going to be this can make some big moves. But I do think that is interesting. This company is already on their series C. So they've raised$100 million, but they launched back in, I believe 2021. so obviously before chat gpt was around and i think that they are just a really smart company that has uh really quickly kind of grabbed onto this new technology um and been able to help them scale it so the company glean chat says that it's the only platform that works across apps and knowledge sources like microsoft 360 google workspace salesforce jira github and around i think they have like a hundred other applications on there um and they it also delivers answers that are personalized for relevance to each user and they follow all real-time enterprise data permission governance rules like I was mentioning earlier.

5:41So I think this is a very powerful tool for any organization in getting information and I think this is just the tip of the iceberg. What they're able to get now is only going to increase the functionality is only going to increase and I think in the next year or two we're going to have some really really powerful tools within companies and outside of companies to get answers on some very specific stuff. One very interesting use case that I would love to see, I highly doubt that we'll see this very soon, but something that I think this kind of technology would be really powerful for. Imagine, number one, I think this helps transparency in a company immensely.

6:15You can get a lot of really interesting data and information from your company without having to go through, you know, long chains of command. But imagine if you had something like this set up with a federal government for whatever country that you live in. And imagine if, you know, unclassified data was all stored in here. And instead of having to go here in the US, we have to do what are called these information. It's the Freedom of Information Act, I think, where essentially you can, journalists can go ask for information on certain things and the government's like, essentially, they have to give you information on it.

6:48Now, a lot of the time they're going to redact, you know, if it's classified, they won't, or they redact a lot of information on the report. So, for example, for, you know, JFK, the president that was assassinated here in the U.S., if you ask for information on that, they'll send you a paper. But, you know, half of it is redacted, meaning there's just it's just blacked out and they won't tell you like all the information in those reports. So I think it would be interesting for a lot of more general things that aren't quite so highly sensitive. I mean, I'm all for making everything publicly available, public transparency.

7:21but um for for a lot of stuff that you know there's not this big question of like is this our nuclear secrets or something i think this would be incredible in a federal government level if citizens were able to or journalists were able to go and query a database like glean for the government um find out a lot of different information about it and get a lot of different answers without having to go through lengthy chains of command i think that'd be very cool the transparency would be awesome but in any case who knows if that or when that would ever happen but we are seeing this in enterprises and I think this is a very powerful technology and tool to continue following into the future.