Glean’s Breakthrough: CEO Arvind Jain on Scaling AI Agents & Search

A week after OpenAI’s o3/o4-mini volleyed with Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash, I sat down with Arvind Jain — ex-Google search luminary, Rubrik co-founder, and now CEO of Glean —just as his company released its agentic reasoning platform and swirled with rumors of a new round at a $7 billion valuation. We open on that whirlwind: why the model race is accelerating, why enterprises still gravitate to closed models, and when open-source variants finally take over. Arvind argues that LLMs should “fade into the background,” leaving application builders to pick the right engine for each task. From there, we trace Glean’s three-act arc—enterprise search powered by transformers (2019), retrieval-augmented chat the moment ChatGPT hit, and now agents that have already logged 50 million real actions inside Glean enterprise customers. Arvind lifts the hood on permission-aware ranking, tool-use orchestration, and the routing layer that swaps Gemini for GPT on the fly. Along the way, he answers the hard questions: Do agents really double efficiency? Where’s the moat when every startup promises the same? Why are humans still in the review loop, and for how long? The conversation crescendos with a vision of work where every employee is flanked by a team of proactive AI coworkers—all drawing from a horizontal knowledge layer that knows the firm’s language better than any newcomer. If you want to know what’s actually working with AI in the enterprise, how to build agents that deliver ROI, and what the next era of work will look like, this episode is packed with specifics, technical insights, and bold predictions from one of the sharpest minds in the space. Glean Website - https://www.glean.com X/Twitter - https://x.com/gleanai Arvind Jain LinkedIn -   / jain-arvind   X/Twitter - https://x.com/jainarvind FIRSTMARK Website - https://firstmark.com X/Twitter -   / firstmarkcap   Matt Turck (Managing Director) LinkedIn -   / turck   X/Twitter -   / mattturck   LISTEN ON: Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/7yLATDS... Apple - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... 00:00 - Intro & Glean’s $7B valuation rumor 02:01 - The AI model explosion: open vs. closed in the enterprise 06:19 - Why enterprises choose open source AI (and when) 10:33 - The agent era: what are AI agents and why now? 12:41 - Automating business processes: real-world agent use cases 16:46 - Are we there yet? The reality of AI agents in 2025 19:24 - Glean’s origin story: reinventing enterprise search 26:38 - Glean agents: from apps to agentic platforms 31:22 - Horizontal vs. vertical: Glean’s strategic platform choice 34:14 - How Glean’s enterprise search works 39:34 - Staying LLM-agnostic: integrating new AI models 42:11 - The architecture of Glean agents: tool use and beyond 43:50 - Data flywheels and personalization in Glean 47:06 - Moats, competition, and the future of work with AI agents