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Knuckle Up with Nakul · 2 min · Sep 9, 2026

Core SaaS systems will remain, while point apps get rebuilt

Arvind Jain · CEO, Glean

Arvind Jain expects major systems of record to persist, while companies recreate narrow apps built around their data.

In this episode

Full analysis
  1. 27:54AI gives Jain strategic visibility he could not get before5 min
  2. 24:02AI will raise customer expectations, not shrink company teamsPro pick 4 min
  3. 41:51Fast innovation makes product moats feel temporaryPro pick 4 min
  4. 33:11Leaders at Glean must build their own priority agents4 min
  5. 38:16Glean tests AI fluency and uses AI to screen hiring packets2 min
  6. 12:33Core SaaS systems will remain, while point apps get rebuilt2 min
  7. 15:04Glean says its context layer cuts token use by 30 to 50 percent4 min
  8. 3:54Glean's edge depends on learning how enterprise work gets done3 min
“So I just actually went and gleaned and asked it to, you know, code up that application and just, you know, connect to the backend database.”
Arvind Jainat 14:17 · Knuckle Up with Nakul
14:17

Takeaways

  1. Major productivity, CRM and HR systems will remain in the near term.
  2. Narrow apps that wrap existing data may be easy to rebuild.
  3. Jain connected a generated app to a backend database.

About this segment

Arvind Jain expects major systems of record to persist, while companies recreate narrow apps built around their data. He says he built an asset-management interface in five minutes.

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.

  • Nakul Mandan, Host · Host, Knuckle Up with Nakul

    General partner at Audacious Ventures; his show goes deep with founder CEOs on how they build.

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

Answers “Is SaaS dead?” See all 36 answers

Answers “What will AI look like in the next few years?” See all 169 answers

Transcript

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

  1. 12:39

    What does the enterprise stack of 2027, 2028 look like in your view? What do Google and Microsoft have? What do Salesforce Workday have? Like, do these systems of record continue and you are on top of them? Because there's also a thesis in the world that agents might just completely take away interface-based SaaS applications. The truth is kind of like, you know, it makes both of those things make sense to some degree.

  2. 13:02

    Like I personally believe that most of these systems of records will remain in the next few years. The Google Productivity Suite, Microsoft, you know, Productivity Suite, Salesforce, and many of these, you know, like your HR systems like Workday, ITSM systems like ServiceNow, each of them will be just fine. They will all be there. And in fact, they will all get very Asian-tic in nature. So if they don't, then of course they will not stay there.

  3. 13:25

    In fact, those are the products that are going to go away, which are not advancing with AI. I think businesses will actually build more systems internally. And the number of applications may end up reducing because if you're building like, if there was a very point use case, like, you know, one specific thing that a SaaS app did for you, you know, where, and that SaaS app is, you know, really let's say UI wrapper on top of your system of record data and Salesforce, let's say, that kind of app, like we do think, that people are going to start to build those kind of systems on their own.

  4. 13:56

    It was very easy. In fact, I'm doing it myself. Like we had this asset management app and it was very, very hard to actually use. I couldn't do any kind of like, literally it's an Excel spreadsheet that you're trying to view in a few different ways. And that system didn't allow you to do that. It didn't allow me to sort, it didn't allow me to filter the way it was not convenient and I couldn't actually ask a quick question off of that.

  5. 14:22

    So I just actually went and gleaned and asked it to, you know, code up that application and just, you know, connect to the backend database. And like, it actually took me like, you know, five minutes. And even the first version of that app was actually pretty good. Behind the scenes, you know, we must have used, I don't know what model it used, probably we must have used Cloud to actually, you know, compute that app.

  6. 14:41

    But that's an example of where users are feeling more confident of building some systems themselves. So we will see that. We will see a lot of like internally built applications.