Glean Takes on Enterprise AI’s Biggest Bottlenecks: Context Gaps, Rising Costs, and AI Sprawl

New Glean Tau desktop experience extends Glean’s enterprise context and controls to local files, applications, and code, while new benchmark shows Glean cuts token costs by 81% versus Claude Cowork

San Francisco, CA - August 26, 2026 - Today at its flagship Glean:GO conference, enterprise AI leader Glean unveiled Glean Tau, a new desktop experience that lets users complete complex work across local files, applications, and code, powered by Glean’s enterprise context. The company also shared new benchmark results showing Glean saves 81% on token costs and is preferred 78% of the time versus Claude Cowork.

The announcements take aim at two growing problems in enterprise AI: the constant “botsitting” required when AI lacks the context to work effectively on its own, and rising token costs as usage grows.

Glean was built around enterprise context from day one. That foundation helps AI work with less human guidance while improving the economics of AI at scale.

Stop botsitting AI

AI can perform increasingly complex work, but users still spend too much time preparing it - finding the right files, supplying background, connecting tools, and steering it through each step.

Glean Tau is a new AI desktop workspace built on an open-source harness that unifies Glean’s enterprise context with local files, applications, and the latest models, giving users the context they need to delegate complex, multi-step work. It can plan, execute, review, recover, and act on a user’s behalf across tasks like organizing files, analyzing documents, creating spreadsheets, and working across connected apps. While coding and engineering workflows are an early use case, Glean Tau brings automation to employees across the enterprise, with Glean’s governance, security, and cost controls built in. 

Context changes AI economics

As AI usage grows, so does the cost of running it. A new Glean benchmark shows how enterprise context can improve those economics while delivering stronger results: Glean saved 81% on token costs and was picked as the preferred answer 78% of the time. Where Claude Cowork averaged $2.98 per query, Glean averaged $0.58.

Glean’s approach keeps relevant, permission-aware enterprise context available to AI, reducing the need to repeatedly search for and rebuild that context every time work gets done. Combined with intelligent model routing, this helps enterprises reduce the cost of AI without sacrificing quality. Expanded Glean Intelligence capabilities give enterprises more control over those economics, with centralized usage visibility and AI usage controls, plus enhanced auto routing that lets administrators prioritize efficient, balanced, or frontier models based on price-performance tradeoffs across knowledge work.

Unifying AI across the enterprise

AI sprawl is accelerating as enterprises adopt more models, agents, and AI tools, creating more surfaces for enterprises to connect, manage, and secure. Glean provides the leading enterprise AI platform for bringing that ecosystem together, carrying consistent context, intelligence, and controls across the places AI is built and used. 

• Glean Transform: Find the work AI should do, and prove the value: New Glean Transform uses real activity signals to understand how work actually happens, identifies the best split between people and AI, recommends where AI can take on work, connects those opportunities to recommend skills and agents, and measures business impact. 
• Proactive Task Management and Coordination: Act on work before the user has to ask: Glean uses enterprise context to understand what needs attention, identify specific next steps, and help move work forward before the user has to ask - from drafting a follow-up to preparing for a meeting. Email triage brings company context into the flow of work to prioritize what matters and prepare follow-ups, while independent agents will extend proactive AI to longer-running work.
• Interactive Dashboards: Turn enterprise data into a living decision surface: Glean is expanding interactive dashboards that combine structured data with unstructured business context, including tickets, conversations, and documents. Dashboards refresh as underlying information changes, proactively surfacing the context teams need to make decisions.
• Team Chat: Bring individual context and permissions into collaborative AI work: New team chat enables multiplayer collaboration, letting teammates work with Glean together in the same shared thread or interactive artifact, bringing enterprise context directly into collaborative work.
• AI Gateway: Govern AI wherever it shows up: Glean is expanding its existing AI Gateway to support more AI entry points, enforce restricted topics policies through Glean Protect, and expand governed MCP access beyond enterprise context to include organizational skills and personal memory.
• Context-Aware AI Threat Detection: Detect risky agentic behavior in context: Glean uses signals from its Enterprise Graph and context layer - including who is acting, what data is involved, and sequences of actions - to distinguish legitimate agentic activity from threats such as data harvesting, data exfiltration, or destructive actions, including cases where individual actions may be permitted but the combined pattern signals risk.

The more AI does, the more context matters

“Models are getting better and more interchangeable. Understanding the enterprise is not. We designed Glean around that reality in 2019. The more AI moves from answering questions to actually doing work, the more valuable company context becomes, because it tells AI what matters, what should happen next, and how to act within the realities of the business.” – Emrecan Dogan, Chief Product Officer, Glean

“Glean has made it easier for us to scale AI safely by giving teams stronger control, trusted context, and a multi-model choice, so they can move faster without giving up governance.” – Rhonda Baldwin, CIO, LaunchDarkly

“Glean stands out because it delivers context above all else. In other platforms, it would take a huge number of tokens to recreate the same depth of context. Because Glean is native and the data is already indexed and loaded, the value is immediate.” – David Lee, Director, People and Places Enablement, LegalZoom

Availability

• Generally available: Glean Intelligence, AI usage controls, memory via MCP
• Beta: Independent agents, AI gateway, auto routing, team chat, interactive dashboards live and scheduled refresh 
• Coming soon: Glean Tau, Glean Transform, context-aware threat detection, task management, meeting coach, email triage, skills via MCP

Learn More: 

• Blog: The intelligence era is here: Efficient, governed, and proactive AI powered by enterprise context  
• Announcement: Glean also announced the launch of its Global Partner Network to scale its growing enterprise AI ecosystem.

About Glean

Glean is the trusted context and intelligence layer for enterprise AI. Glean brings together company knowledge, people, permissions, and activity to give AI a deep understanding of the enterprise, then applies the right intelligence and models to get work done effectively. Glean Protect extends consistent security, permissions, and governance across AI applications, agents, and other entry points. Together, these capabilities power Glean Assistant and Glean Agents and enable organizations to deploy and scale AI across the enterprise through an open platform of native integrations, MCP, and APIs.

Media Contact
‍Sierra Dowling
press@glean.com