What is Glean?
Glean is an AI platform for work that connects and understands enterprise data to provide answers and automate work. Other companies use Glean as a foundation for building agentic AI products. The main thread tracks its product strategy, adoption patterns, and the hidden labor costs of AI usage.
Release history
- Dec 2025 - Arvind Jain said that some of Glean’s fine-tuning work for specific use cases within its product did not pan out, and the company chose to go with already built models.
- Mar 2026 - Karan Vaidya said that AWS, Zoom, Glean, and Airtable are using and building their core agentic products on top of [the unnamed platform].
- Jun 2026 - Rebecca Hinds reported that employees spend 6.4 hours per week on “bot sitting,” the hidden human labor required to make AI usable, and that 36% of AI sessions fail.
- Jul 2026 - Arvind Jain said that some users spend $10,000–$15,000 per month on tokens while others spend $20, indicating wide variation in AI consumption.
- Jul 2026 - Arvind Jain said the market is in a “land grab” phase, with every company wanting a product like Glean.
In the discourse
Attributed discussion of Glean.
Bot sitting consumes 6.4 hours per week, roughly half the time AI is reported to save, per Glean research.
“Which the report finds consumes 6.4 hours per week, or roughly half of all the time that AI supposedly saves.”Rebecca Hinds · 10 Jun 2026
36% of all AI sessions fail, requiring workers to start over or do significant rework, per Glean research.
“We're seeing about 36% of all AI sessions fail, meaning a worker goes to use the technology and it's not successful.”Rebecca Hinds · 10 Jun 2026
Rebecca Hinds explains 'bot sitting' as the hidden human labor required to make AI usable, including feeding context, correcting errors, and manually bridging disconnected tools.
“We're coining this phrase bot sitting as the hidden human labor that is required to make the technology usable.”Rebecca Hinds · 10 Jun 2026
Rebecca Hinds coins the term 'bot bullshit' for employees shipping AI work they cannot explain.
“40 to 41% of employees saying they ship AI work that they couldn't explain if asked. This is bot f***.”Rebecca Hinds · 10 Jun 2026
73% of workers say AI makes them more productive and report saving 13 hours per week on average, per Glean research.
“73% say it makes them more productive. And on average, they report saving 13 hours per week, a third of a full work week.”Rebecca Hinds · 10 Jun 2026
69% of workers admit to some form of 'bot bullshit', passing off AI output without being able to defend its quality, per Glean research.
“69% of people admit to some form or some amount of bot f***.”Rebecca Hinds · 10 Jun 2026
Only 13% of organizations have employees reporting significant AI productivity gains, per Glean research.
“What we see in the most effective organizations so the 13% who are who have employees saying that significant productivity gains are occurring they measure they measure a lot of different things.”Rebecca Hinds · 10 Jun 2026
Feeding AI context carries the highest exhaustion multiplier among bot-sitting tasks because it is work the AI should already be doing, making the effort feel both redundant and draining.
“In the report we call it the exhaustion multiplier and what we see is the highest exhaustion multiplier is associated with feeding AI context right because that is in the best case something your AI should know.”Rebecca Hinds · 10 Jun 2026
The most effective AI organizations share productivity measurement data with employees, not just management, reversing the typical top-down analytics model.
“They don't just measure productivity but they also put that data disproportionately more in the hands of employees.”Rebecca Hinds · 10 Jun 2026
Enterprise AI token spend follows a steep power law. Some Glean users spend $10,000 to $15,000 per month while most spend around $20.
“You will see some people who spend $10,000 or $15,000 in tokens every month. And then you have others who are spending $20.”Arvind Jain · 11 Jul 2026