Glean

Glean is enterprise search that grew an assistant, not an assistant that learned to search. It indexes the systems a company already works in — the vendor claims 275+ connected apps and data sources — and resolves every result against the permissions already set in those tools, so a person sees only what they could see before Glean arrived. On top of that index it builds an "Enterprise Graph" of how people and documents relate, exposed as Glean Search, Glean Assistant and Glean Agents, with a governance layer called Glean Protect for guarding sensitive content and flagging unusual activity. That grounding layer is why it is credible where a generic chatbot is not: answers cite internal sources instead of guessing at them.

Be honest about who this is not for. It is sold to large organisations through a sales conversation — the pricing page carries no numbers, only a demo request — so a team of fifty is in the wrong shop, where lighter options cover the same need. The certifications it advertises (SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 and 42001, HIPAA, GDPR) confirm the target buyer rather than helping you choose. Two things decide whether it pays off, and both are yours: connector coverage for the stack you actually run, and the permissions and content hygiene underneath, because an answer engine inherits every mislabelled document and over-shared folder it indexes. Buy it when search has become a real cost across many systems, and pilot it on questions people actually ask.