$7B AI founder: "AI is not capable of replacing you right now"

Arvind Jain (0:00)

AI is not capable of replacing you right now. Let's be clear, it's not ready to replace even a single human today. I actually don't believe that companies will be successful in reducing their workforce significantly. My high school kids, they can tell you very quickly what text is written by AI and which one is not. It's the pace of innovation that is actually creating that feeling of anxiety. You never feel this feeling of, hey, you have arrived or, okay, a company has been built, we have a stable business. It's completely elusive right now for us.

Nakul Mandan (0:28)

There is a war going on right now over who owns the AI assistant for knowledge workers. The one tool that sits across everything you do at work and actually knows your company. OpenAI and Anthropic won that seat, so do Microsoft, Google, Notion, and 100 startups. One company got there first, Glean. Arvind Jain founded it in 2019 after a decade building Search at Google and co-founding Rubrik. Today, Glean is over $300 million in ARR and valued at $7.2 billion.

In 2024, OpenAI reportedly told its own investors not to fund five competitors. Glean was on that list. Our conversation today with Arvind is interesting for two reasons. One, he holds that pole position against the most powerful companies in tech, and two, he's running one of the first and most AI native companies in the world. This is going to be a power pack conversation for everyone in AI. Nakul out.

Arvind, welcome to the show.

Arvind Jain (1:35)

Thank you for having me.

Nakul Mandan (1:36)

You've put yourself in this pole position which every company in the world wants to win. The AI assistant for knowledge workers, the big labs want it, Google wants it, Notion wants it. Tens of startups are chasing this. But as all of them now make forays into it, and especially the big labs, let's start them as they get to know every knowledge worker and what's happening in every organization. What is Glean's product edge in this world?

Arvind Jain (2:00)

First of all, we started Glean in early 2019

That makes us the world's first enterprise generative AI company.

We've been focused on the knowledge worker since then, trying to understand how people work, what are their information needs, knowledge needs. It's very interesting that in the last seven and a half years, as we sort of brought our product to thousands of enterprises, first of all, the sheer number of challenges that you have to actually solve, which have mostly nothing to do with your actual product that you're trying to build. Like we're building an AI product, of course, right? You come in Glean, you ask questions, and we'll bring the right answers and the right information back to you. That's how we got started. Today, we are a co-worker. You come to Glean. You can actually go beyond us asking questions. You can give us some work to do, and we'll do that work on behalf of you. Behind the scenes, of course, we're connected with all of these, you know, your enterprise systems, we understand how your business works.

So we do that, but the challenge is to actually get this product up and running inside an enterprise.

A lot of that has nothing to do with AI. It has got to do with how do you actually handle data safely and securely? How do you understand what is the governance architecture of an enterprise? What information can be seen by what users? What are policy and compliance requirements if you're in a regulated industry? What are the things that you can do with AI and you can't? So I think one thing that we always educate our enterprise customers is that this is a complex undertaking, bringing a really good coworker to your employees while meeting all of your enterprise requirements. It requires effort and energy and that experience that we have learned over the years. So the main edge for us is that experience, the fact that we've been in this business for a long time. But then maybe I will also share a little bit more about where we spend our R&D resources. So the company now is about 1,500 employees. That makes us one of the largest pure play enterprise AI companies in the world. But we're actually not spending a lot of that time trying to train and build models. Glean is a multi-model product. We actually partner with the best model companies, whether that's OpenAI or Anthropic or Google. We actually also incorporate open source models built on NVIDIA technology or other open source model out there. It's really great to be in that position where we can actually leverage that innovation that the labs are bringing. And then we get to actually build things that they're not focused on yet. So that together, with their technology plus our technology, we can bring the best experience to our users. So that's part of our core strategy.