User guide overview
Glean gives you a conversational interface to your company's knowledge. Ask questions, create documents and presentations, analyze data, and get work done, all grounded in what your organization knows. Every response is personalized to you based on your permissions, activity, and role.
For details on how Glean selects and combines knowledge sources, see How Glean accesses information.
What you can do
You can use Glean to:
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Ask and find: Get answers with citations from your company's documents, messages, and data. When you type a keyword-style query, search results appear inline so you can jump straight to the right document.
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Research: Generate detailed, citation-rich reports that synthesize information from internal systems and the web. See Deep Research.
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Create content: Draft and refine documents in Canvas, then export as slides, spreadsheets, or interactive artifacts. You can also generate images from natural-language prompts.
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Work with code: Search across repositories and generate code with draft pull requests grounded in your organization's codebase.
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Query data: Ask natural-language questions against Databricks and Snowflake datasets without writing SQL.
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Capture meetings: Record transcripts, summaries, decisions, and action items without adding a bot to the call. See Meeting notes.
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Talk hands-free: Have real-time voice conversations on web, desktop, and mobile.
Fast and Thinking modes
Glean is powered by an agentic engine that plans tasks step by step and adapts as it works. It draws on the full context of your enterprise to take on complex work, select the right tools for each job, and refine its approach as it learns. To control how much it does up front, choose a response mode:
- Fast mode: Optimized for speed. Works well for straightforward questions. Actions from connected apps (MCP tools) are not available in Fast mode — switch to Thinking mode if you need them.
- Thinking mode: Uses deeper reasoning and searches more thoroughly across your company's knowledge. Works well for complex, multi-step questions that benefit from citations and detailed responses. Supports the full set of tools, including actions from connected apps.
Thinking mode is the default. You can switch modes at any time from the chat input, and your selection persists across queries. When Glean runs in Adaptive mode, it starts fast and automatically falls back to Thinking mode when a question needs deeper reasoning or tools that Fast mode doesn't support.
Search results in chat
When you type a short, keyword-style query, a compact set of high-confidence search results appears directly in the conversation. This helps you jump straight to relevant documents and people without switching to the Search page.
Results appear for queries that look like a search rather than a conversation, for example a document title (Q3 roadmap), a team or person name, or a short keyword phrase (OKR 2025).
- Type a keyword or short query in Glean.
- A compact set of top results appears inline above the chat answer.
- Click any result to open it, or select View more results to open the full Search results page.
As you type, Glean also suggests relevant documents in the autocomplete dropdown. For more information, see Document autocomplete.
Queue messages
You don't have to wait for Glean to finish responding before you send your next message. While Glean generates a response, send another message to add it to a queue instead of interrupting the response in progress. Queued messages appear as a list above the composer and run in order automatically, as each response completes.
- Queue multiple messages. You can stack several follow-ups while a response runs.
- Runs in order. Glean processes queued messages one at a time, in the order you sent them. Each queued message starts after the previous response finishes.
- Persists across sessions. Queued messages persist across chat sessions, so they remain if you refresh the page or reconnect.
Before a queued message runs, you can act on it from its row in the queue:
- Edit the message text.
- Delete the message to remove it from the queue.
- Send now to run the message immediately instead of waiting for its turn.
Where to use Glean
You can access Glean from multiple surfaces:
- Web app: Go to your organization's Glean URL or click New chat in the left navigation.
- Desktop app: A dedicated app for macOS and Windows with quick-chat access from anywhere on your machine. See Glean for Desktop.
- Mobile: Use Glean on the go. See Mobile.
- Browser extension: Access Glean from the sidebar on any webpage. See Extension sidebar.
- Glean companion: A floating overlay that provides context-aware assistance as you browse. See Glean companion.