Glean Assistant Levels Up: From Helper to Proactive Coworker
The latest upgrade transforms Glean Assistant into a personalized, action-capable AI partner that anticipates tasks, organizes work, and executes actions for employees
Glean is transforming what a personal AI coworker can do in the enterprise. Less than three months after its last update, the company is rolling out what it calls a “generational step-change” to its Glean Assistant, giving employees a proactive partner that doesn’t just surface insights—it anticipates tasks, organizes work, and executes actions across the tools they already use.
“Most assistants today are still focused on generating responses, but enterprise work is about execution—coordinating people, knowledge, and systems to get things done,” Emrecan Dogan, Glean’s chief product officer, says in a release. “As companies move from AI experiments to real adoption, they need tools that understand their business and can safely take action across it. Glean Assistant is designed as an expert and agentic daily work partner, grounded in enterprise context, so it can reason about real work and help employees turn intent into outcomes.”
Adding to this, Rohan Vora, Glean’s head of product, tells The AI Economy. “We truly believe this is where we are trying to push the boundaries of how agentic systems can actually start becoming proactive co-workers who are able to take actions on your behalf, who can then invoke other specialists as and when needed, and orchestrate all of that for you.”
Glean’s expansion of its AI assistants and agents reflects a broader shift across enterprise software, where companies including Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft, Google, SAP, and Amazon Web Services are embedding more autonomous, action-capable AI directly into their platforms rather than limiting it to chat-based assistance.
To put a finer point on what Glean means by a “generational step-change,” Vora clarifies that today’s announcement is about transforming work on the personal level, enabling every knowledge worker to have a highly personalized, proactive coworker that can manage their tasks, time, and work artifacts—all without needing to be an AI expert or relying on department-level automation.
What’s New with Glean Assistant and Agents
Glean has two main AI offerings: its Assistant and agents. The difference rests with the assignment. As Vora describes it, the former is like a general physician whom you would go to first to receive a diagnosis. But, if that doctor orders blood tests or specialized examinations, that new healthcare professional, be it a cardiologist or orthopedic surgeon, would be the equivalent of an agent.
That said, here’s a look at the updates rolling out for Glean’s Assistant and its agents:
Real-time voice collaboration: Employees now have a hands-free option to interact with Glean.
Brand-aligned slide generation: This expands on Glean’s existing document and image generation capabilities. Glean Assistant can create slide presentations grounded on an organization’s knowledge and ensure it’s aligned with established brand standards (e.g., fonts, colors, and visual guidelines).
Canvas now supports collaborative creation: Glean Canvas, the feature for drafting, iterating, and refining written content, now lets employees work together with the Glean Assistant. New features include Slack message and email adaptive user interfaces, and the previously mentioned branded slides.
Agent sandboxes for deeper research and analysis: Glean is adding a new, secure, lightweight virtual development environment equipped with a Command Line Interface (CLI), a code interpreter, a filesystem, and a tool index. This sandbox lets Glean Assistant analyze large datasets and run long-running tasks without being constrained by LLM context window limitations, while respecting enterprise permissions.
Personal graph insights: Glean Assistant is now more personalized for the worker, allowing them to view, edit, and delete personal graph details that reflect their role, projects, goals, and preferences. This data is—pardon the expression—gleaned from emails, documents, chats, wikis, and searches beyond chat history. It’s also LLM-independent.
Proactive organization with agent templates: There are three new agents coming to Glean’s platform. The first is a daily action bot that helps organize an employee’s day, summarizing what they need to act on. Next is the “plan my day” agent, which coordinates work around meetings and helps employees understand when to schedule focus time. The last one is a weekly snippet agent that summarizes everything an individual accomplished that week.
Most of these features are generally available today. However, slide generation, real-time voice communication, and the Glean Assistant actions via MCP are still in beta. The agent sandbox capability is expected to come soon.
Bringing Together a Team of Experts
“Glean’s vision is to empower human potential to do more, be the best work enterprise assistant at work,” Vora shares. This mission is what the company believes sets it apart from competitors offering similar enterprise search engines, such as HubSpot, Slack, Dropbox, and Atlassian.
“One of the problems we kind of see with AI adoption is most tools that are trying to help people do more are kind of bolted on to singular systems,” he claims, pointing out that AI implementations are limited to a single platform’s data—chat messaging, for example—without the ability to access CRM, ticketing systems, or other enterprise applications.
“What we’ve seen in [the] real world is actual agentic workflows and enterprise assistants [that] are horizontal and cut through all those systems.”
Elaborating further, Vora argues that knowledge workers don’t just need AI—they need an assistant that operates like an entire team of experts, seamlessly handling tasks, analyzing data, and executing decisions on their behalf. They need a tool that rises above any one platform and can see the bigger picture. The AI needs to be a salesperson, a data scientist, a researcher, etc. Glean’s hoping that its Assistant can be the orchestrator for all of these personas, giving every employee a dedicated digital helper that can readily tap into these expert bots on their behalf.
“Glean Assistant becomes the agentic coworker for you. For the average end user in the organization, when Glean Assistant is set up, they don’t need to worry about a ton because they can always go into this Glean Assistant, talk to it using prompts, voice, natural language, whatever it is, and Assistant has access to all the right tools, workflows, personalization to help them complete their job,” Vora reiterates.
And Glean isn’t stopping there. The company says it’s closely monitoring the evolution of the OpenClaw framework and signals that it wants to give its own agents greater autonomy and proactivity. “There is a whole level of proactivity that we’ve not even unlocked,” Vora admits. “This ability to create more artifacts, be able to take a lot more actions, is going to be a requirement for this to be able to do that. Because if it’s able to talk back to you, either with voice or a text memo, that’s not going to be a very useful thing. It needs to be able to like [say], ‘I did this thing for you.’”