Glean is making a bold bet that the future of enterprise AI won't be won at the interface level. The company, which started as an enterprise search tool, is now positioning itself as the critical middleware layer that sits between AI applications and company data. CEO Arvind Jain revealed the strategic shift during this week's Equity podcast, signaling that the real land grab in enterprise AI isn't about chatbots - it's about infrastructure.
The enterprise AI stack is getting a major reshuffling, and Glean wants to own the layer no one sees but everyone needs.
CEO Arvind Jain laid out the company's new vision during an interview on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, explaining why Glean is abandoning its original enterprise search positioning to become the connective tissue between AI applications and corporate data. It's a calculated retreat from the flashy AI assistant wars into the more lucrative but less visible infrastructure game.
"We realized the interface isn't where the value is," Jain told the podcast. "Every company is going to build their own AI applications. What they need is a layer that can securely access, understand, and deliver the right enterprise data to those applications."
The pivot makes strategic sense in a market that's becoming brutally competitive at the application layer. Microsoft has Copilot embedded across its suite. Google is pushing Gemini into Workspace. Salesforce just launched Einstein GPT with native CRM integration. For a startup like Glean to compete head-to-head with these giants on user-facing AI would be suicide.
But infrastructure? That's where the real money flows. Middleware doesn't need to win hearts and minds - it just needs to work reliably and integrate seamlessly. It's the same playbook that made Twilio worth billions without consumers ever hearing its name, or essential despite most shoppers having no idea it's processing their payments.
