Why AI needs your company’s context | Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean

80 to 90% of a company's know-how lives in people's heads, says Glean founder and CEO Arvind Jain, and AI needs that context to do good work. In this TNW Podcast episode, Arvind breaks down how Glean captures that know-how from everyday work, why most enterprise tasks can run on far cheaper models, how plugging Glean into Claude makes it twice as fast on half the tokens (according to Glean's own studies), and why Glean wants to be easy to replace. Arvind, who previously worked on Google Search and co-founded Rubrik, started Glean in 2019 after seeing that nobody at Rubrik could find anything inside the company. He calls it the world's first enterprise generative AI company, and today Glean has about 1,500 employees and more than 1,000 large enterprises as customers, with word of mouth still its biggest growth channel. ⏱️ Timestamps 00:00 Intro 01:51 How companies use Glean 06:46 Why not just use Claude? 10:27 Why Glean wants to be replaceable 13:13 How Glean protects employee privacy 15:28 How Glean got started 16:56 Word of mouth and rapid growth 18:25 What context really means 21:06 Rapid fire: scaling and fundraising 22:53 How Arvind spends his day as CEO 23:36 Career lessons and advice for graduates 25:34 Where the idea for Glean came from 26:08 Why big companies get slow 27:37 Where Glean saves people time 29:34 Is Glean Asana plus Claude? 📩 Questions or suggestions? contact@thenextweb.com