# AI gives Jain strategic visibility he could not get before

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/ai-gives-jain-strategic-visibility-he-could-not-get-before/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Arvind Jain](https://realalpha.app/builders/arvind-jain/) · Arvind Jain is founder and CEO of Glean. · Founded Glean, the AI work assistant, after co-founding and leading R&D at Rubrik and a decade at Google.
- Host: [Nakul Mandan](https://realalpha.app/people/nakul-mandan/) · Host, Knuckle Up with Nakul · General partner at Audacious Ventures; his show goes deep with founder CEOs on how they build.
- Show: Knuckle Up with Nakul
- Episode: [$7B AI founder: "AI is not capable of replacing you right now" | Arvind Jain (CEO, Glean)](https://realalpha.app/v/zPtwI6JaRy0/), Sep 9, 2026
- Moment: 27:54 to 32:28 of the episode (5 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/ai-gives-jain-strategic-visibility-he-could-not-get-before/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/zPtwI6JaRy0/?t=1674

## Quote

> “now you can get these kind of analysis done super quickly and that allows me to sort of like now **move much much faster** as an organization”
> — [Arvind Jain](https://realalpha.app/builders/arvind-jain/) at [30:02](https://realalpha.app/v/zPtwI6JaRy0/?t=1802) · Knuckle Up with Nakul

## Takeaways

1. He checks engineering projects against shifts in company strategy.
2. An agent surfaces strong performers who may be overlooked.
3. Customer risk dashboards suggest actions to prevent churn.

## About this segment

Arvind Jain uses AI to align projects with strategy, find overlooked talent, and spot customers at risk of churning. These company-wide insights go beyond saving an executive time.

From “$7B AI founder: "AI is not capable of replacing you right now" | Arvind Jain (CEO, Glean)”, Sep 9, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/zPtwI6JaRy0/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[28:00](https://realalpha.app/v/zPtwI6JaRy0/?t=1680) partly and always compare these tools and see like you know how how we make lean better as a result the things that i do with ai number one this like i i'm a very curious person i have i have questions all the time i mean that's why you started lean as a answering machine in the first place that's right like i was really passionate about that you know and the yeah because you know i felt that that would be a product that you know i would i would like so much you know for my uh for my work so um so i have i have these questions uh all the time and before my way of getting these answers was that i would ask my executive team to give me like you know give me a report on this or give me data on that and and i think it was i was probably very annoying to them like you know with the frequency and the volume of questions you know that i had

[28:43](https://realalpha.app/v/zPtwI6JaRy0/?t=1723) for them and now i self-serve myself you know for all of those things i have actual system access to those systems you know where i'm looking for answers and then glean is my always the first stop. Sometimes, you know, I will verify. So if I did some analysis, I got some data back and I'll ask my CTO, hey, does this look right or not? So that's one thing, like, you know, just self-serving myself with whatever information needs, whatever questions that I have has become so easy. And in fact, there are certain things, you know, that you just simply couldn't do before. I'll give you an example. And this is like how I'm actually doing strategic work with AI. We made a shift in our product direction earlier this year and context and intelligence platform became a big part of our story we always had the platform but we said like like this year we won't actually have half

[29:28](https://realalpha.app/v/zPtwI6JaRy0/?t=1768) of our users not coming from our first party products but from these other products like cloud and chat gpt and that required a change in you know company directions i communicated i talked to the team but then like for the for the first few months i would always run a deep analysis in glean and i would say that hey look you know look at every individual look at every engineering project and tell me you know which projects are actually no longer aligned you know with with our new strategy something that we should deprioritize and this analysis you know before like you know you could do this analysis once a year it's a full tickle down from like and i would ask my you know the head of engineering they would ask their managers and and then you get these reports but now you can get these kind of analysis done super quickly and that allows me to sort of like now

[30:12](https://realalpha.app/v/zPtwI6JaRy0/?t=1812) move much much faster as an organization align our projects better with our strategy and there are a lot of other topics like those I'll give you two more examples one of my favorite ones is that I'm always trying to look for who are the best people in our company and the ones you know who are somewhere there hidden in the organization they do great work but they're not that vocal and or maybe they're like a little bit too far down in the organization for us to have visibility so so i have this agent that actually you know helps you know find you know that the top 10 people uh for me and and explains to me like you know why they are actually that's a great example because in the history prior world that would always be gatekept by politics and whose favorite exactly exec's favorite person yeah and so these are like self-service examples as a ceo that you

[30:58](https://realalpha.app/v/zPtwI6JaRy0/?t=1858) know i have and then finally the third example i'll give you is uh is customer management so one of the big things that enterprise, you know, sales company is managing churn, like making sure customers are happy and doing the right things for them before those customers, you know, choose to go away from you. And, and so like companies have always built these, you know, customer success dashboards and, and oftentimes, you know, there's never, you know, truth in those.

[31:22](https://realalpha.app/v/zPtwI6JaRy0/?t=1882) They are not up to date. Like people don't, actually, people are not as motivated to actually keep, enter the latest information. And a lot of context is actually lost in customer conversations that you're having. uh with these customers uh which is very hard to sort of then summarize and and organize but now it has all become very easy so we have in glean we have this system called prism where so now i have this you know live dashboard where for each customer it actually gives us like the full view on what is happening with them and and what's the risk and it actually scores itself like you know what are the top customers you know that are churned risk for us And in fact, it goes beyond and actually also says that these are the three things you can do to actually fix these customers.

[32:06](https://realalpha.app/v/zPtwI6JaRy0/?t=1926) There's a very actionable system that we've built, which was never possible with AI. But that is actually another one. And this is what we call enterprise level intelligence. So this is no longer like, how do I improve one person moving faster? This is about how do we do these things that we simply could not, you know, in the pre-AI world.