Fireside Chat, Interview
From AI Adoption to AI ROI | Glean & Altimeter Capital | RAISE Summit 2026
- Glean leverages expertise from Google and Rubrik to address enterprise AI rollout challenges, positioning itself as a context provider and horizontal AI platform that integrates with diverse foundational models rather than competing in model training.
- The company anticipates a shift in the enterprise AI landscape where open source models will handle the majority of inferencing workloads within the next two years, though it warns against over-reliance on the Model Context Protocol (MCP) due to potential inefficiencies and high costs.
- Glean plans to demonstrate ROI by deploying departmental agents for specific, cost-known processes like customer service, RFPs, and legal reviews, aiming to prove that a 40% improvement in effectiveness can offset staff growth needs and justify increased budgets.
- Facing accelerated AI costs where annual budgets are consumed in one or two months, the strategy has moved from broad education to focused use cases, with a Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) function currently operating at a small revenue scale to develop scalable partnerships with consulting firms.
- While data security and governance remain significant persistent concerns regarding agent access rights, Glean distinguishes itself by placing a greater focus on the context and enterprise integration layer than other market players.
- Despite significant market demand, the company estimates that the combined AI industry currently delivers only 5% of the feature set or value required by enterprises, indicating a substantial gap between current supply and future expectations.