Glean Founder: AI Entrepreneurs Should Start with Users

In an in-depth interview with Sequoia Capital, Arvind Jain, founder of Glean, shared the challenges and opportunities of enterprise search and AI applications landing on the ground within organizations. He emphasized that in order to build effective AI applications, a strong data infrastructure must be in place, including deep integration of enterprise systems, a robust security and permissions framework, and a complex knowledge graph that understands the relationships between people, content, and context.Jain said that the difficulty with enterprise search is the private nature of the data, permissions-based access, and deep contextual dependencies, and that it is critical to understand the organizational structure, user roles, and access rights. Jain also noted that AI entrepreneurs should start with the user, providing clear value to the user through key functionality before expanding to more AI capabilities, which will help build enterprise trust and provide the data base needed for advanced functionality. He envisions a future where AI assistants will proactively help users do their jobs and change the way work is done, so that everyone can be more productive with a powerful AI assistant. Additionally, Jain advised entrepreneurs to focus on solving business problems rather than pursuing AI technology, as AI is just one of the tools to solve problems.