The conversation surrounding enterprise artificial intelligence has fundamentally shifted. For the past two years, the focus was on which Large Language Model (LLM) was superior or which chatbot could answer questions the fastest. However, a more critical battle is now emerging in the C-Suite: who owns the infrastructure that actually executes work across the organization?
As companies move from tentative AI pilots to full-scale deployment, the friction caused by fragmented software ecosystems is becoming undeniable. Microsoft pushes its Copilot within the 365 environment, while Salesforce advocates for its Agentforce within its CRM ecosystem. This creates what industry veterans call "vertical silos"—walled gardens where AI works beautifully, provided you never leave that specific vendor’s territory.
Glean, the enterprise AI platform led by former Google Distinguished Engineer Arvind Jain, is betting $7.2 billion that companies will reject these silos in favor of a neutral, horizontal "AI layer." Fresh off a $150 million Series F funding round in June 2025, Glean is positioning itself not just as a search tool, but as the "Switzerland" of enterprise AI—an agnostic connectivity layer that sits underneath every application a company uses.
Why is the industry moving toward a ‘horizontal’ AI layer?
The primary challenge facing modern enterprises is data fragmentation. When an employee needs to execute a complex workflow, the necessary data rarely lives in a single repository. Customer details might be in Salesforce, contract terms in Microsoft Word, and internal discussions in Slack. Vertical AI solutions, like Microsoft Copilot or Salesforce Agentforce, excel within their own boundaries but often struggle to contextualize data from competing ecosystems.
Arvind Jain argues that relying on these vertical silos leads to disjointed operations and severe vendor lock-in. "To truly unlock new levels of creativity, productivity, and operational efficiency, AI needs to draw on the full picture of an organization’s knowledge," Jain stated. By building a horizontal layer, Glean aims to index and retrieve data across all competing software ecosystems without favoring one vendor. This approach addresses the "scattered data" problem that Jain originally set out to solve when he founded the company in 2019, alongside his experience co-founding Rubrik.
How does Glean plan to break down data silos?
Glean’s strategy involves positioning itself as the connective tissue of the enterprise stack. Rather than building another app that employees must switch to, Glean’s technology integrates directly into the existing workflow, connecting disparate apps like Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Slack, and Salesforce. This allows the AI to "see" across the entire organization, regardless of where the data resides.
This neutrality is central to Glean’s value proposition. By refusing to prioritize one data source over another, the platform avoids the conflicts of interest inherent in tools built by the tech giants. Jain emphasizes that this "AI layer" must sit underneath applications to prevent the very silos that giants like Microsoft are inadvertently creating. "The core question now is which entity will control the foundational AI layer powering these functions," Jain noted, highlighting the strategic importance of this infrastructure.
Is the market ready for agentic AI workflows?
The market’s appetite for this solution is reflected in Glean’s rapid financial ascent. The company’s valuation has surged to $7.2 billion following its June 2025 Series F led by Wellington Management. This comes less than a year after a Series E round in September 2024 that valued the company at $4.6 billion. This aggressive growth signals a broader market shift from simple Q&A chatbots to "agentic" systems—software that can actively perform tasks.
Glean reports that its platform now powers over 100 million "agent actions" annually. These are not merely search queries; they are automated steps in complex workflows. The company recently launched "Glean Agents" and "Next-Gen Prompting" tools designed specifically to automate multi-step business processes. According to reports from TechCrunch, "Enterprise AI is shifting fast from chatbots that answer questions to systems that actually do the work across an organization." This transition from passive retrieval to active execution places Glean in direct competition with the agentic capabilities of Salesforce and Microsoft, but with the distinct advantage of cross-platform operability.
What This Really Means
Glean’s rise represents a defensive move by the enterprise market against total dominance by Microsoft or Google. If a single vendor controls the AI layer, they effectively control the operating system of the modern business, making migration or diversification nearly impossible. By valuing Glean at $7.2 billion, investors like Sequoia and Wellington are betting that CIOs will pay a premium for neutrality to maintain leverage over their software vendors. However, the risk remains high: Glean is essentially trying to become the browser for enterprise data, a position that the tech giants will likely try to commoditize or crush as their own cross-platform capabilities mature. The winner will not be the one with the smartest model, but the one that can successfully convince IT leaders that neutrality is a feature worth paying for.
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