AI that actually makes your job easier with Arvind Jain from Glean
28 May 2024 (6 months ago)
Glean: An AI-Powered Work Assistant
- Glean is an AI-powered work assistant that connects and understands all of an enterprise's knowledge.
- Arvin Jain, the founder and CEO of Glean, identified the challenge of accessing internal information in the cloud while working at his previous startup, Rubric.
- A survey revealed that employees struggled to find the necessary information to do their jobs, leading Jain to realize the need for a comprehensive search tool.
- Despite initial fundraising challenges, Jain secured funding and started Glean as a separate company.
- Glean leveraged advancements in AI, language models, and Vector search to build a smarter search engine that went beyond keyword matching.
- The company's growth accelerated as the market demand for AI-powered knowledge management tools increased.
Glean's Product and Approach
- Glean's models learn through user feedback and continuous training on vast amounts of data within client companies.
- The company employs a rigorous review process to ensure accurate, relevant, and compliant responses.
- Glean uses two techniques to answer questions: training models with safe company knowledge and using a rack-style architecture with out-of-the-box models for content generation.
- Data security is ensured by training models within customers' environments and respecting permissions and governance.
- Glean addresses the issue of over-sharing sensitive documents by helping customers find and secure them.
Glean's Leadership and Vision
- Arvin Jain transitioned from being the R&D leader at Rubric to becoming the CEO of Glean.
- He emphasizes product-centricity and believes that a good product leads to success.
- Glean's vision is to become a personal assistant for every working individual, automating 50% of their tasks within the next few years.
- The company is focused solely on solving the problem of enterprise search and has no plans to become a multi-product company.
Rubric: Balancing Product Development and Cybersecurity
- Dominic Madori Davis, the guest speaker and former Head of R&D at Rubric, discussed the challenges of balancing product development and cybersecurity.
- Rubric kept its cybersecurity product separate from its main product to maintain quality.
- Davis emphasized the importance of cybersecurity, especially in protecting sensitive HR data and external software integrated into a company's "dark web" pages.
- He described his unique leadership strategy of "letting go" of employees while occasionally micromanaging them, acknowledging that he is still learning and adapting in his new role.
- Davis expressed his strong focus on product development and prioritizing product quality.