🔵 Glean Launches Agents

Decentralized Intelligence, Autonomous Coding Agents, Security Risks in Agentic Age

Author

Dominik Sansevere
February 13, 2025


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What’s happening in agents right now

Glean's new agent builder

A significant shift is occurring in how AI gets deployed within enterprises. Glean, known for its enterprise search and knowledge management tools, has launched Glean Agents - a platform that aims to let any employee create and deploy AI agents across their organization. This marks an important evolution from isolated departmental AI tools toward horizontal, organization-wide agent deployment.

The promise and perils of AI agents

The core promise is compelling: empower employees to automate workflows by describing desired outcomes in natural language, while the system handles the complex orchestration behind the scenes. Glean's platform spans both internal enterprise data and external internet sources, potentially addressing the data fragmentation that has limited earlier agent deployments.

But two major hurdles have historically constrained enterprise AI agent adoption:

  1. Data governance and security concerns around giving AI broad access to sensitive information

  2. The challenge of making agent creation accessible to non-technical users while maintaining appropriate guardrails

Glean appears to be tackling these head-on with granular permissions controls and what they call "active data and AI governance" - continuous scanning for potential data exposure risks. The platform includes pre-built agents to accelerate adoption while also allowing customization.

What’s available today

In terms of current availability, Glean Agents offers several core capabilities including various agents (Glean Assistant, Glean Apps, Glean Assist, and Glean in Slack/Teams), along with an agent builder for prompts and Glean Apps, a prompt library, universal knowledge web search, and active data and AI governance reports. Currently in beta are the agentic reasoning engine, agentic prompts, structured data analysis for Atlassian and Salesforce, and continuous reports for active data and AI governance. Structured data analysis for Databricks is available in private preview. Looking ahead, several features are coming soon: a natural language agent builder, agent orchestration, a unified agent and prompt library, and dashboards and remediation for active data and AI governance.

Why this matters 

The ability to safely deploy AI agents horizontally across an organization, rather than in isolated departmental silos, could dramatically impact enterprise productivity. As Zillow SVP Toby Roberts notes in Glean's announcement, this type of technology can help distributed teams stay connected while working flexibly.

However, successful enterprise-wide agent deployment requires solving thorny challenges around:

  • Data access controls and compliance

  • User experience and adoption

  • Integration with existing workflows and tools

  • Performance and reliability at scale

Looking ahead 

Enterprise AI deployment is entering a new phase focused on practical utility rather than technical novelty. The winners will likely be platforms that:

  1. Make agent creation accessible while maintaining appropriate controls

  2. Seamlessly integrate with existing enterprise systems and data

  3. Provide clear governance and security guarantees

We're still in early stages, with many features in beta or preview. But if platforms like Glean Agents deliver on their promise, we may see AI agents become as commonplace in enterprises as email and chat are today.

The key question for business leaders: How do you balance empowering employees with AI tools while maintaining appropriate oversight and controls? The answer will likely determine which organizations successfully navigate this transition.

The next few quarters will reveal whether horizontal AI agent platforms can deliver on their transformative potential while addressing enterprise requirements for security, compliance and control.

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