App of the Week: Glean, enterprise AI search and agents

Glean is an enterprise AI platform that connects to your company's apps, lets people search and ask questions across all of them, and lets teams build AI agents on top of that context. It is a strong pick for large organizations with dozens of tools and strict permissions. If you are a 30-person company living in Google Workspace and Slack, it is probably more platform than you need.

Each week we pick one tool from the AI App Hunters directory, look at what it actually does, and tell you who should buy it and who should skip it.

Key takeaways

• Glean calls itself "the Enterprise AI platform connected to your enterprise's data", with search, an assistant and agents in one product.
• It offers more than 250 connectors, and results are permission-aware, so people only see what they already have access to.
• Agent Builder, an Agent Library and Agent Governance cover building, sharing and certifying agents.
• Pricing is not published as of October 2026. You book a demo.
• Best for large enterprises with sprawling tools. Skip it if your company knowledge lives in two or three apps.

What is Glean?

Glean's pitch is simple: "Find, create, and automate anything." It indexes the systems your company already uses and puts three products on top.

• Enterprise Search to "find answers across your company."
• Glean Assistant, described as "your enterprise AI coworker", for answering questions, analyzing data and creating content from company and web knowledge.
• Glean Agents to build and manage agents that act on that context.

Around those sit governance pieces: Glean Protect for safe AI rollout, an AI Gateway to "govern every AI interaction", and a Model Hub with access to 40+ LLMs.

Glean lists certifications including SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, HIPAA, GDPR and TX-RAMP Level 2. Customers named on its homepage include Booking.com, Zillow, TIME, Ericsson and DBS. Find it at glean.com.

Who is Glean for?

Glean fits organizations that:

• Run many tools across engineering, sales, support, IT, finance, legal and HR, and lose time hunting for documents.
• Have strict access rules, so a plain chatbot with a shared index would be a security problem.
• Want one governed place to roll out AI assistants and agents instead of every team buying its own.
• Have an IT or platform team that can own a rollout and a vendor relationship.

It is a weaker fit for small companies, teams whose knowledge mostly lives in one workspace tool, and buyers who want to swipe a card and start today.

What are Glean's standout features?

Permission-aware search across your stack

This is the foundation, and it is the hard part. Glean connects to Slack, Google Drive, Jira, Confluence, SharePoint, GitHub, Salesforce and many more. The assistant page describes connectors for "personalized and permissions-enforced enterprise search." In practice that means a sales rep and an HR lead can ask the same question and get different answers based on what each can already open. Any AI search tool that does not handle this well will not survive a security review.

Glean Assistant

The assistant works through a find, plan, research, iterate and deliver loop across company tools, docs, conversations and the web. Glean says it "adapts to your role, priorities, and the way your organization actually works" and offers proactive suggestions on updates and blockers. It can draft documents and decks, and a beta feature lets you bring teammates into the same Glean chat.

Agents with governance built in

Glean's agent pages cover three jobs. Agent Builder lets teams build reasoning-based agents and workflows. Orchestration lets you "trigger agents from key events, route tasks between agents, and connect to external systems." Agent Library and Agent Governance let you share, certify and control agents as adoption grows. For large companies, that governance layer matters more than the builder itself.

Developer platform and MCP

Glean's developer site lists a Platform API with search, chat and agents generally available, an Indexing API for custom data sources, and client libraries in Python, TypeScript, Java and Go. It also runs an MCP server that works with Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, VS Code and JetBrains AI Assistant. An agent toolkit plugs into LangChain, CrewAI, the OpenAI Agents SDK and Google ADK. If your engineers already build with AI, this means Glean can be the context layer under their tools, not just a separate search box.

How much does Glean cost?

Glean does not publish pricing as of October 2026. Its site directs buyers to "Get a demo", and there is no self-serve plan.

What to ask on the sales call: the per-seat price at your headcount, any minimum seat count or platform fee, whether agents and the Model Hub cost extra, which connectors are included, and how long a typical rollout takes for a company your size. Ask for the answers in writing.

What are Glean's limitations, and who should skip it?

• No public pricing. You cannot budget without a sales process, and small teams may not get far in one.
• It needs owners. Connecting hundreds of sources, mapping permissions and certifying agents is real IT work. Plan for it.
• Value depends on tool sprawl. The more scattered your knowledge, the more Glean helps. If everything is already in one workspace, the gain is smaller.
• Overlap with tools you already pay for. Notion, Claude and ChatGPT business plans now include connectors and search across company apps. Check what you already have before adding a platform.
• Vendor claims need testing. Glean's homepage cites figures like hours saved per user. Treat those as vendor numbers and run your own pilot with real questions.

Skip Glean if you are under a few hundred people, your knowledge lives in two or three apps, or you need to start this week without procurement.

What are the best Glean alternatives?

Notion puts Enterprise Search (in beta) and AI agents on its Business plan and above, with premium connectors such as GitHub, Jira, Box and Salesforce.

Claude lists "enterprise search across your organization" and admin controls for connectors on its Team plan, with SSO and audit logs on Enterprise.

ChatGPT Business and Enterprise suit companies that have picked OpenAI as their main assistant. Gemini is the natural comparison if you run on Google Workspace.

Bottom line: is Glean worth it?

For the right company, yes. Glean takes on the hardest part of workplace AI: connecting hundreds of sources while respecting who can see what, then governing the agents built on top. Large enterprises with real tool sprawl should put it on the shortlist.

Run a pilot with one department and 20 real questions people ask every week. Compare the answers against what you get from the search features in tools you already pay for. If Glean wins clearly on accuracy and permissions, the sales process is worth it. If it does not, you have saved a large contract.