Arvind Jain, founder and CEO of Glean, explains the core engineering hurdles in enterprise search and AI retrieval.
Insight
Jain: Vector Search Alone Cannot Solve Enterprise Search
“There's a lot of focus on embeddings and vector search over the last few years, but that's actually only one part of, ah, building a good search system. Because if you think about an enterprise, ah, imagine a company that has been around for a few decades. You…”
Opinion
Glean CEO: AI models are nowhere near replacing retrieval via infinite context
“I mean, I think there's always this thought of that, like, you know, the models will have near infinite context windows and you can just give them everything and they can figure things out automatically. But I don't think, you know, like they're anywhere close…”
Insight
Jain: Companies feared effective search because it exposed internal governance gaps
“We started to hear from businesses that, oh, I'm scared of good search. I don't want a good search product in my company because I have all these governance gaps. I have like, you know, sensitive information all over the place.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Jain: Workers will have personal AI teams performing 90% of their work
“And one thing that's going to fundamentally happen is that each one of us is going to have this amazing team Of, you know, call it assistants, coworkers, coaches that are truly personal to you. And, you know, you're always surrounded by that team. And this tea…”
Insight
Jain: Enterprise search requires transformer models due to scarce user signals
“On the web, even if you don't have good semantic understanding, there is so much that you're going to learn from people's behavior because, you know, you have a billion people, you know, coming and using your product. In the enterprise, you don't have that lux…”
Insight
Jain: Enterprises Care More About Process Automation Than Personal AI Assistants
“Businesses are actually a lot more, more interested in, not in that, but in actually thinking about how they can transform their company with AI, how they can take specific business processes, you know, where they're spending a lot of money and how, how do the…”