Glean’s AI Assistant Moves to Execution, Not Just Insight

PALO ALTO, CA – February 17, 2026 – Work AI company Glean today unveiled the next generation of its AI Assistant, an ambitious effort to transform the role of artificial intelligence in the workplace from a passive information retriever to an active, "agentic" partner. The new Glean Assistant introduces a suite of advanced features, including real-time voice collaboration, on-brand slide generation, and secure "sandboxes" for deep analysis, all designed to help employees move seamlessly from an idea to a completed task.

The announcement positions Glean against tech giants like Microsoft and Google in the increasingly competitive enterprise AI space. However, the company is betting that its deep, cross-platform contextual understanding and focus on execution—not just generation—will solve the persistent problem of AI adoption stalling within large organizations.

Beyond Search: The Rise of the Agentic Coworker

For years, enterprise AI has largely been synonymous with enhanced search or content summarization. Glean's latest offering represents a significant leap toward what many see as the technology's true promise: agentic AI. These are autonomous systems capable of understanding complex goals, breaking them down into multi-step tasks, and executing them across various applications with minimal human supervision.

This new assistant is designed to function as an expert coworker, grounded in a company’s unique context. It leverages Glean’s proprietary "Enterprise Graph," a dynamic map of a company's information, people, and processes. This is augmented by a "Personal Graph" for each user, which learns their role, projects, and even writing style from their activity across emails, documents, and chats. This dual-graph system allows the assistant to deliver highly personalized and context-aware support.

"Most assistants today are still focused on generating responses, but enterprise work is about execution - coordinating people, knowledge, and systems to get things done," said Emrecan Dogan, Glean’s Chief Product Officer, in the company's announcement. "As companies move from AI experiments to real adoption, they need tools that understand their business and can safely take action across it."

This shift from passive insight to proactive action is the core of the new release. Instead of just finding a relevant sales report, the assistant can be tasked with analyzing the data within it, creating a summary presentation that adheres to company branding, and scheduling a follow-up meeting with the sales team—all from a single prompt.

Tackling the AI Adoption Gap

Despite the widespread hype, many organizations struggle to translate their investments in AI into tangible, daily productivity gains. Employees are often faced with fragmented tools, generic AI responses that lack company-specific context, and workflows that add more friction than they remove. Glean aims to close this gap by providing a single, unified interface where work gets done.

The platform's ability to connect with over 100 enterprise applications—including Salesforce, Jira, Confluence, and Asana—is central to this strategy. By integrating directly with the systems where work already happens, the assistant can take meaningful actions, such as creating a new ticket in Jira, updating a customer record in Salesforce, or adding a task to a project plan in Asana, all while respecting existing user permissions.

The results, according to early adopters, are significant. Swiggy, a major food delivery platform, reported saving "nearly two hours saved per employee per day," according to its CTO, Madhusudhan Rao. Other customers have cited similar gains. Super.com reported saving over 1,500 hours monthly, while Webflow claims to have saved over 300 hours a month. These figures suggest that a deeply integrated, context-aware AI can indeed move the needle on operational efficiency.

A New Arsenal of Features

The latest generation of Glean Assistant is packed with new capabilities designed to streamline complex workflows. While some are still in beta, they paint a clear picture of the company's vision for the future of work.

• Real-time voice collaboration: Currently in beta, this feature allows employees to interact with the assistant hands-free. This could enable a user to get a briefing on their day's meetings while commuting or ask the assistant to summarize a long document without breaking their focus from another task.
• Company brand aligned slide generation: Moving beyond simple text and image creation, the assistant can now generate complete slide presentations. Crucially, these slides are designed to automatically align with a company’s established brand standards, including fonts, colors, and logos, dramatically reducing the time spent on formatting and polish.
• Agent sandboxes: Marked as "coming soon," this feature promises to give the AI a secure, lightweight virtual environment to perform deep research and analysis on large datasets. Equipped with a code interpreter and filesystem, these sandboxes would allow the assistant to run long, complex tasks without being constrained by the context window limitations of large language models (LLMs), all while respecting enterprise permissions.

Other features, such as image generation, advanced code search, and proactive agent templates for organizing the workday, are already generally available. The combination of these tools empowers the assistant to not only respond to requests but also to anticipate needs and proactively help employees plan and execute their work.

Navigating a Crowded Field with a Focus on Trust

Glean is not operating in a vacuum. Microsoft's Copilot is deeply embedded within the ubiquitous Microsoft 365 ecosystem, and Google is aggressively integrating its Gemini AI across its Workspace suite. These tech giants have the advantage of a massive, built-in user base.

Glean's strategy is to be the connective tissue between these platforms and the dozens of other specialized applications that modern enterprises rely on. Its value proposition is not in replacing a user's word processor but in creating a single layer of intelligence that understands and operates across the entire, often fragmented, corporate tech stack.

With this power comes immense responsibility, and Glean appears to be taking data security and privacy seriously. The company emphasizes that its platform was built from the ground up with permissions-aware governance. It holds key security certifications, including SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, and is compliant with regulations like GDPR and HIPAA. Critically, Glean states it does not use one customer's data to train models for another, and all analysis occurs within each customer's single-tenant environment.

Furthermore, the platform is designed to keep a human in the loop. Users have the ability to view and edit the "personal graph" details the AI has inferred about them, ensuring transparency and control. All actions taken by the assistant are subject to admin-defined guardrails, ensuring that this powerful new coworker operates safely and predictably within the boundaries set by the organization. This balance between autonomous capability and human oversight will be essential for building the trust required for widespread adoption.