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Howard Katzenberg

Founder & CEO, Glean AI · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveoperatorLinkedIn ↗glean.ai ↗

Howard Katzenberg is the founder and CEO of Glean AI, an AI-driven accounts payable and spend management platform that was acquired by Pipe in 2025. Prior to founding Glean AI, he served as the CFO of small-business lender OnDeck through its IPO and as CFO of Better.com.

11statements → 10claims → 1claims resolved → 3.91/5average certainty → 1.45/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 9 not checkable as stated how the 10 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 9 assertions · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 10 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 9 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Howard argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up
Katzenberg: External AI model pricing will fall over 12-18 months
“I think their pricing will continue to improve. So we can't just look at like where their pricing is today and assume it's going to be static over the next 12 months or 18 months. Cause like as they compete, their compute costs will come down. Like they'll, I …”
Howard Katzenberg Nov 29, 2023 ▶ 21:20 How Glean AI Slashes Vendor Costs: CEO Howard Katzenberg on AI Accounting

How they sound: speaking style how? →

256 words/min while actually speaking · 4 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Howard Katzenberg: only 6 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 6 raw tape exchanges is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,272 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Howard Katzenberg said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Not checkable as stated
LLM migration eliminated annotation teams and increased Glean AI's gross margins
“The accuracy rates are better. Our cost to compute has gone down and like, it is the data scientist. We don't need a team to do annotations anymore for the models. And it's just like, it's like our gross margins. It's done like two step functions over the cour…”
Howard Katzenberg Nov 29, 2023 ▶ 9:16 How Glean AI Slashes Vendor Costs: CEO Howard Katzenberg on AI Accounting
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Katzenberg: 99 out of 100 vendor bills were approved automatically at Better
“And when I actually analyzed what our approval rate was at Better, 99 out of a hundred bills were getting approved.”
Howard Katzenberg Nov 29, 2023 ▶ 3:56 How Glean AI Slashes Vendor Costs: CEO Howard Katzenberg on AI Accounting
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Katzenberg: Commercial LLMs do not provide extraction confidence scores
“One of the drawbacks of using LLMs is like, we're not receiving confidence scores. On the extractions.”
Howard Katzenberg Nov 29, 2023 ▶ 9:55 How Glean AI Slashes Vendor Costs: CEO Howard Katzenberg on AI Accounting
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Katzenberg: LLMs are very poor at performing calculations
“We're going to do the calculations because the LLMs are very poor at that.”
Howard Katzenberg Nov 29, 2023 ▶ 11:41 How Glean AI Slashes Vendor Costs: CEO Howard Katzenberg on AI Accounting
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Katzenberg: Glean AI business grew over 3x in 2023
“Our business is up like three X, over three X so far this year.”
Howard Katzenberg Nov 29, 2023 ▶ 18:56 How Glean AI Slashes Vendor Costs: CEO Howard Katzenberg on AI Accounting
Prediction Held up
Katzenberg: External AI model pricing will fall over 12-18 months
“I think their pricing will continue to improve. So we can't just look at like where their pricing is today and assume it's going to be static over the next 12 months or 18 months. Cause like as they compete, their compute costs will come down. Like they'll, I …”
Howard Katzenberg Nov 29, 2023 ▶ 21:20 How Glean AI Slashes Vendor Costs: CEO Howard Katzenberg on AI Accounting
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Katzenberg: Manual vendor spend audits consistently yielded about 10% savings
“Inevitably, we'd find errors, we'd find consolidation opportunities, we'd play bad guy negotiations, but we'd find about 10% of savings opportunities each time we conducted this exercise.”
Howard Katzenberg Nov 29, 2023 ▶ 2:12 How Glean AI Slashes Vendor Costs: CEO Howard Katzenberg on AI Accounting
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Better identified $1.5M in savings on $15M of annual vendor spend
“The last time we did it was in 2019 and, at Better, the run rate on vendor spend at the time was about fifteen million dollars annually. And we've identified 1.5 million of savings.”
Howard Katzenberg Nov 29, 2023 ▶ 2:27 How Glean AI Slashes Vendor Costs: CEO Howard Katzenberg on AI Accounting
Disclosure
Glean AI shifted 100% of its machine learning stack to LLMs
“Over the course of the last 12 to 18 months, we've done a hundred percent shift to LLM modeling for the complete stack. And we're using Vertex and OpenAI.”
Howard Katzenberg Nov 29, 2023 ▶ 8:57 How Glean AI Slashes Vendor Costs: CEO Howard Katzenberg on AI Accounting
Assertion Not checkable as stated
League Apps saved $20,000 on Salesforce contract using Glean AI benchmarking data
“So we gave him benchmarking data and he reported back that they saved 20 K versus their prior contract.”
Howard Katzenberg Nov 29, 2023 ▶ 13:08 How Glean AI Slashes Vendor Costs: CEO Howard Katzenberg on AI Accounting
Assertion Not checkable as stated
League Apps estimates Glean AI saves 2-3% of non-payroll spend
“And then he also said like, he estimates that Glean, like the value is like two to three percent of non-payroll spend.”
Howard Katzenberg Nov 29, 2023 ▶ 13:15 How Glean AI Slashes Vendor Costs: CEO Howard Katzenberg on AI Accounting

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
How Glean AI Slashes Vendor Costs: CEO Howard Katzenberg on AI Accounting Nov 29, 2023 16m
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