Beyond Hype: Glean Charts a Practical Course for Enterprise AI

PALO ALTO, CA – December 10, 2025 – As enterprises grapple with the monumental task of moving artificial intelligence from isolated experiments to a core operational fabric, the gap between AI's promise and its practical implementation remains a significant chasm. Addressing this challenge head-on, Work AI platform Glean has unveiled a dual strategy aimed at demystifying AI adoption: the launch of the research-focused Work AI Institute and the debut of autonomous agents powered by a sophisticated new foundation, Glean Enterprise Context. This two-pronged approach signals a pivotal shift in the market, moving beyond generic AI tools to offer a structured, secure, and context-aware blueprint for intelligent automation.

Rewriting the Playbook: From AI Hype to Actionable Strategy

For many business leaders, the AI revolution has been characterized by a confusing mix of hype, pilot project purgatory, and uncertainty over return on investment. The new Work AI Institute, a collaboration between Glean and leading academics from institutions like Stanford, Harvard, and UC Berkeley, aims to cut through this noise. Led by Dr. Rebecca Hinds, a Stanford-educated researcher with a background in applying academic rigor to workplace innovation, the institute is dedicated to decoding what actually drives results in AI-powered organizations.

Its inaugural publication, The AI Transformation 100, co-authored by Hinds and renowned Stanford Professor Emeritus Dr. Bob Sutton, serves as a practical field guide. Distilling insights from over 100 executives and technologists, the report offers an evidence-backed roadmap with key, if sometimes counterintuitive, findings. It cautions that AI is an amplifier, not a panacea—it will magnify existing efficiencies and dysfunctions with equal force. A central theme is the preservation of human expertise; the report warns leaders, “Don’t automate the soul out of work,” emphasizing that AI’s true value lies in augmenting human craft and judgment, not replacing it.

“Too many organizations are sprinting into AI without understanding the real barriers to making it useful,” said Bob Sutton in the announcement. “The companies getting real results aren’t just plugging in better tools—they’re rewiring how decisions get made, how people collaborate, and how work moves. AI becomes most powerful when it’s embedded in the often-messy, everyday machinery of how the organization really operates.” This philosophy underscores a critical market need: for AI to work, it must first understand work.

The Engine of Automation: Unpacking 'Enterprise Context'

Glean’s answer to this challenge is its new technical foundation, Glean Enterprise Context. This is not another AI assistant but a comprehensive intelligence layer designed to give AI a deep, evolving model of an organization's people, processes, and knowledge. It moves beyond simple data access to build a holistic understanding of how a company functions, a crucial differentiator in a crowded market.

At its core is a dynamic, multi-layered knowledge graph built by integrating over 100 connectors to enterprise systems like Salesforce, Jira, Confluence, and now Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Netsuite. This graph maps not just data points, but the intricate web of relationships between employees, teams, projects, documents, and workflows. It constructs both an "enterprise graph" for organizational knowledge and "personal graphs" that capture individual work patterns. This allows the AI to understand, for instance, not just what a sales report contains, but who created it, which team relies on it, and what meeting it was discussed in.

A key component is "enterprise memory," which enables AI agents to learn from completed tasks, progressively building process knowledge unique to each company. This is distinct from the offerings of competitors like ServiceNow or UiPath, which also provide powerful agentic automation but often within their own platform ecosystems. Glean’s strategy is to act as a universal "system of context" that sits across all applications, providing a unified intelligence layer that powers any AI action, securely and with full awareness of the organizational landscape.

From Assistant to Autonomous Agent: A New Era of Secure Automation

Building on this contextual foundation, Glean has debuted the industry’s first autonomous agents designed with full enterprise context. These agents represent a significant leap from today's interactive assistants, which primarily respond to direct commands. Glean's agents are engineered to interpret high-level instructions, reason through multi-step plans, adapt to new information, and execute complex tasks end-to-end across multiple applications.

For example, an agent could be tasked to "compile the Q3 sales performance data for the North American enterprise team, cross-reference it with open support tickets in Jira, and generate a draft summary for the upcoming quarterly business review." The agent would autonomously identify the correct tools (Salesforce, Jira, Confluence), sequence the necessary actions, pull the relevant data, and assemble the document, all while communicating its reasoning.

Crucially, this autonomy is governed by a robust framework of security and control—a non-negotiable for CIOs navigating the risks of AI. Glean’s platform is built on a permissions-aware architecture, ensuring agents only see and act on data the user is authorized to access. New agent alignment models automatically verify that an agent’s actions remain within its original scope, preventing unintended behavior. The system also respects sensitivity labels from platforms like Google Drive and Microsoft Purview, providing a layered defense against data leakage. This focus on "guardrails" directly addresses the primary barrier to adoption for many enterprises: the fear of losing control over powerful, autonomous AI systems.

Navigating the Path to Widespread Adoption

Glean’s announcements arrive as enterprises reach an inflection point. The initial excitement around generative AI is giving way to the hard realities of implementation. Surveys consistently show that while AI use is growing, significant hurdles remain, including data fragmentation, integration with legacy systems, security vulnerabilities, and a persistent skills gap. The market is saturated with solutions, but many fail to address the underlying complexity of enterprise workflows.

By pairing academic research on best practices with a technology platform designed to solve the foundational problem of context, Glean is positioning itself as a strategic partner for digital transformation, not just another tool vendor. Its approach acknowledges that successful AI deployment is as much an organizational challenge as it is a technical one. The Work AI Institute’s findings—that leadership must be actively involved and that AI must be embedded in workflows, not treated as a "side hustle"—provide the cultural and strategic framework necessary for the technology to succeed.

As organizations move to scale AI, the ability to orchestrate intelligent agents safely across a fragmented landscape of applications will be paramount. The demand is shifting from AI tools that can answer questions to AI systems that can get work done. Glean's vision of a unified, context-aware, and securely governed AI fabric offers a compelling path forward, potentially accelerating the transition for companies looking to finally harness AI's full transformative power across the enterprise.