Glean Launches the Work AI Institute, Unveils Autonomous Agents Built on Glean Enterprise Context to Operationalize AI at Work

Palo Alto, CA - December 10, 2025 - Work AI leader Glean today announced the launch of the Work AI Institute, a first-of-its-kind research initiative dedicated to decoding what actually drives results when companies commit to operating with AI at the core of their businesses. At the same time, Glean unveiled Glean Enterprise Context, the most comprehensive foundation for AI in the enterprise, combining memory, connectors, indexes, both personal and enterprise graphs, and governance to power agents that can reason, adapt, and act with real understanding of how work gets done.

Together, these announcements underscore a central insight: AI only delivers real impact when it’s grounded in context - a deep, evolving understanding of an organization’s people, processes, systems, and knowledge. From research to product, Glean is helping organizations move beyond experimentation to durable, intelligent automation at scale.

A New Lens on Work AI: The Work AI Institute + The AI Transformation 100

The Work AI Institute brings together leading researchers from Stanford, Harvard, UC Berkeley, Notre Dame, University College London, Emory, and UNC Charlotte to answer a pressing question: What’s really working with AI at work? The Institute blends academic rigor with real-world data, experimentation, and end user insights to help enterprises separate signals from noise and accelerate meaningful AI impact.

Its first major publication, The AI Transformation 100, co-authored by Dr. Rebecca Hinds and Stanford professor Dr. Bob Sutton, turns the firsthand experience of more than 100 executives, technologists, and researchers into an evidence-backed blueprint that can help drive AI success. It captures the breakthroughs, missteps, and hard-earned lessons from the experts and global organizations who’ve already scaled AI, distilling them into 100 practical strategies companies can put to work right now.

Among the key learnings:

• AI amplifies, so point the megaphone carefully: AI doesn’t fix broken systems - it amplifies whatever it touches, for better or worse, depending on where you aim it.
• Don’t automate the soul out of work: AI can take on the grunt work, but if you automate the human craft and judgment, the work becomes hollow and alienating.
• Leaders can’t phone it in: AI adoption spreads when leaders actively use the tools themselves, signaling that experimentation is safe and expected.
• Structure eats AI for breakfast: Even great AI sputters in the wrong org design, so leaders must flex their structures—centralizing when needed and decentralizing when speed matters.
• Make AI part of the work, not a side hustle: AI gains traction only when it’s embedded in everyday workflows; treat it as a bolt-on and it just adds complexity.

“Too many organizations are sprinting into AI without understanding the real barriers to making it useful,” said Bob Sutton, Stanford Professor Emeritus and co-author of The AI Transformation 100. “Our goal with this research was to cut through the hype and identify what's actually working, or might work. The companies getting real results aren’t just plugging in better tools—they’re rewiring how decisions get made, how people collaborate, and how work moves. AI becomes most powerful when it’s embedded in the often-messy, everyday machinery of how the organization really operates.” 

Download the full AI Transformation 100 report here.

Glean Debuts the Industry’s First Autonomous Agents with Full Enterprise Context

The research is clear: to drive meaningful impact, AI must understand how organizations actually work. Glean is making that vision real with the debut of the industry’s first autonomous agents designed for the enterprise - AI systems that reason, adapt, and take action on their own.

• Industry’s first autonomous agents with full enterprise context: Glean’s new autonomous agents interpret instructions, make decisions, adapt as they go, and communicate their reasoning, eliminating the need for rigid workflows or low-level scripting. With the new auto mode in Glean’s agent builder, anyone can create autonomous agents in a matter of minutes. These agents complete end-to-end tasks across tools like Salesforce, Jira, Confluence, and GitHub, using 100+ built-in actions that are dynamically selected and sequenced based on enterprise context.

Glean Enterprise Context, the most comprehensive technical foundation for AI in the enterprise, powers these capabilities. Glean Enterprise Context gives AI a deep, evolving model of how each organization operates - its data, its people, and its processes - enabling agents to reason intelligently, act reliably, and stay aligned to intent.

This context is built from the ground up by unifying connectors, indexes, memory, knowledge graphs, and actions into a single architecture that supports automation at scale:

• Enterprise memory that learns your business: As agents complete tasks, they learn how your organization works, building up process knowledge over time. This memory is unique to each deployment, enabling agents to get smarter and more effective with every action.
• Connectors that extend automation across core systems: Glean now supports native integrations with Microsoft Dynamics 365, Netsuite, Ironclad, Affinity, Procore, and Canva, expanding its offering to support automation across sales, finance, legal, design, and operations.These are part of Glean’s library of 100+ connectors that ingest and index data from the most recognizable productivity tools in the enterprise.
• Tool search that discovers the right applications and actions for every task: Glean’s new tool search capability enables agents to automatically identify the most relevant tools and workflows based on task intent. It leverages Glean’s indexing infrastructure - alongside specialized searches like calendar, code, and expert search - to scale across hundreds of native actions and MCP-enabled tools in the enterprise.
  

To ensure these agents operate safely and as intended, Glean provides built-in guardrails and enterprise-grade protections:

• Agent alignment and controls to enforce intent and guardrails: Agent actions are automatically verified against their original scope using Glean’s agent alignment models, helping prevent out-of-scope behavior and unintended data exposure. Enterprises can also define which individuals or departments are allowed to create agents, with team-level moderators guiding usage and ensuring automation remains trustworthy and well-governed.
• Enterprise-grade protection of sensitive data: Glean continues to enforce user-level permissions and now supports sensitivity labels in Google Drive and Microsoft Purview, which extends to OneDrive, and SharePoint. These protections, alongside dynamic sensitive content detection, provide a layered approach to ensure that enterprise data is protected.

Together, these innovations enable enterprises to safely scale AI throughout their AI journey - from assistant to autonomous agents that get real work done - securely, transparently, and with full organizational context.

Availability

• Generally Available: Connectors for Microsoft Dynamics 365; Departmental Agent Moderator role, ability to restrict the creation of agents with specific actions to individuals and departments
• Beta: Autonomous agents, 85+ new actions for Agents, Connectors for Ironclad, Affinity, Procore, Netsuite, and OneNote, Hide Google Drive content based on sensitive labels, Hide Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive using Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels,
• Coming soon: Agent alignment models, tool search, enterprise memory, Connector for Canva 

Learn More:

• Register for Glean:LIVE - Agents of Change today, December 10 at 10 AM PT to learn more
• The Work AI Institute
• Blog: Glean Autonomous Agents: Self-evaluating with the context and security you need to automate at scale
• Blog: Shifting ownership of context engineering to the AI platform
  

About Glean
‍Glean is the Work AI platform that helps everyone work smarter with AI. Glean Assistant gives every employee a powerful enterprise AI assistant that connects to and understands company data via Glean’s Enterprise Graph, and Glean Agents empowers everyone to create, use, and manage AI agents using natural language. Powered by Glean’s search and agentic engine, Glean’s agents automate work across the organization at scale, while ensuring permissions enforcement, full referenceability, governance, and security. With over 100 connectors, LLM choice, APIs for customization, and no need for costly professional services, Glean delivers scalable, turnkey implementation of a complex AI ecosystem on one horizontal platform.

Connect with Us! 
Blog 
LinkedIn
Twitter X

Contact
‍Sierra Dowling
press@glean.com