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Building One with Tomer Cohen

Building Glean with Arvind Jain: Scaling Enterprise Search with AI Innovation

Mar 11, 2025
Arvind Jain, CEO and founder of Glean and a former Google Distinguished Engineer, discusses his journey to revolutionize enterprise search. Frustrated by workplace information retrieval, he created Glean to tackle efficiency issues for large organizations. They explore the role of AI in solving real-world enterprise challenges, the importance of a scalable design, and the balance between customization and broader applicability. Arvind shares insights on using both explicit and implicit data to enhance the platform, highlighting the transformative potential of AI in the workplace.
48:09

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Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

  • Arvind Jain founded Glean to address workplace information retrieval challenges, stemming from his personal frustration with inefficient search systems at companies.
  • Glean's architecture was intentionally designed for scalability to meet the demanding needs of large enterprises and support extensive data growth.

Deep dives

The Origin of Glean

The need for Glean arose from a common challenge faced by many employees: the inability to effectively search for and access information within their own companies. Many employees have experienced the frustration of knowing valuable documents and policies exist but being unable to find them, whether it's about dental benefits or crucial project specifications. Arvind Jain, the CEO and founder of Glean, saw this issue firsthand while working at Rubrik, where rapid company growth led to a noticeable decline in productivity due to poor information retrieval systems. This realization sparked his entrepreneurial journey, leading him to create a platform designed to centralize search capabilities across various knowledge systems, addressing a widespread problem that he discovered was affecting many others as well.

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