The takeover of the AI ​​industry has taken place. Glean creates a layer under the interface.

In the push for form, Glean is betting on something less obvious: being a smart unit underneath.

Seven years ago, Glean became the Google of business – an AI-powered search tool designed to automate and search across a company’s SaaS library, from Slack to Jira, Google Drive to Salesforce. Today, the company’s strategy has shifted from creating better chatbots to being a way to communicate between brands and business processes.

“The layer that we built in the first place — the search engine — required us to better understand people and how they work and what they like,” Jain told TechCrunch last week. Image of Equitywhich we wrote at Web Summit Qatar. “All of this is now becoming the basis for building high-quality agents.”

He argues that although the main forms of language are dynamic, they are also generic.

“AI models don’t understand anything about your business,” Jain said. “They don’t know who the different people are, they don’t know what kind of work you do, and what kind of products you make. So you have to connect the ideas and the creativity of the brands and the content within your company.”

The tone of Glean is that it already captures the story and can sit between the model and the business data.

The Glean Assistant is often a customer entry point – a well-known chat system powered by leading integrators (i.e., ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude) and open models, based on industry information. But what keeps customers, Jain argues, is everything underneath.

The first step is to find a model. Rather than forcing companies to offer a single LLM service, Glean acts as a layer, allowing businesses to switch or combine models as capabilities change. That’s why Jain says he doesn’t see OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google as competitors, but as partners.

“Our products are better because we are able to use the technology that they are creating in the market,” Jain said.

The second is the connections. Glean integrates deeply with systems like Slack, Jira, Salesforce, and Google Drive to track information flow and enable agents to take action within those tools.

And third, and perhaps most important, is authority.

“You have to create permissions-knowing authority layer and adoption layer that can bring the right information, but know who is asking the question so that many filters according to their right to access,” said Jain.

In large organizations, that layer can be the difference between testing AI solutions and deploying them at scale. Businesses can’t just put everything in-house for example and create a buffer to manage the solutions later, says Jain.

Also important is to ensure that the models are not mutually exclusive. Jain says his system verifies the output in line with the source documents, creates a line-by-line statement, and ensures that the solutions respect existing rights.

The question is whether that middle layer will survive as the tower giants push deeper into the pile. Microsoft and Google already control how businesses operate, and they’re hungry for more. If Copilot or Gemini can access the same internal systems with the same permissions, is a vertical intelligence layer still necessary?

Jain argues that businesses do not want to be locked into one type or sector of production and may choose to diversify into a neutral sector instead of supporting an integrated one.

Marketers have bought into that myth. Glean raised $150 million Series F in June 2025, approx doubling its value to $7.2 billion. Unlike frontier AI labs, Glean doesn’t require a lot of computing capital.

“We have a healthy, fast-growing business,” Jain said.