Memory and personalization

Memory is a persistent, privacy-safe continuity layer that enables Glean to remember your preferences, work context, and ongoing projects. Memory helps Glean provide more relevant, personalized responses without requiring you to repeat information across sessions.

Deployment availability

Memory is available for GCP deployments that use Glean Universal Key. Support for additional cloud environments is coming in future releases. On deployments where memory isn't yet available, the Personalization section doesn't appear in Settings. Contact your Glean administrator or Glean Support for more information.

How memory works

Glean uses two types of memory to personalize your experience:

• Saved memories: Explicit, user-controlled information you tell Glean to remember (for example, "Remember that I prefer concise answers" or "I'm a Sales Engineer in EMEA").
• Extracted memories: Insights Glean learns automatically from your chats and your broader work activity. These include your response preferences, role and responsibilities, active projects, and recent topics.

Memory improves response quality and efficiency for tasks that benefit from personalization, including tone, style, role awareness, and continuity across conversations.

Prerequisites

Memory is available for GCP deployments that use Glean Universal Key. On deployments where memory isn't yet available, the Personalization section doesn't appear in Settings. Contact your Glean administrator or Glean Support for more information.

note

Memory does not grant Glean access to documents you cannot access. Memory only stores user-level facts and preferences.

How to manage your memories

You can view, edit, and delete your memories from Settings, and you can also add and manage memories directly in chat.

Memory categories

Glean organizes memories into the following categories:

Category	What Glean may remember	How it helps
About you and your work	Your role, responsibilities, and professional context	Tailors answers to your level of familiarity and day-to-day work
How you like to work	Preferences for tone, format, level of detail, and collaboration style	Makes responses feel more natural and useful
What you're working on	Ongoing projects, initiatives, and areas of focus	Provides continuity so you don't have to re-explain active work
Your goals and priorities	Objectives, priorities, and the outcomes you're working toward	Keeps recommendations aligned with what matters to you
People you work with	Key collaborators, teams, and organizational relationships	Accounts for who's involved in your work
Relevant knowledge and context	Work-related terminology, areas of expertise, and recurring topics	Makes answers more relevant to your domain and vocabulary
Your instructions and boundaries	Standing guidance about what to do, avoid, or keep in mind	Helps Glean follow your preferences consistently
Recent context	Topics and context from recent conversations or work activity	Helps you pick up where you left off
Memories you explicitly save	Information you directly ask Glean to remember	Gives you control over the context Glean carries across conversations

Benefits of memory

Memory helps you work more efficiently by:

• Reducing repetition: You don't need to re-explain your role, preferences, or project context in each conversation.
• Providing continuity: Glean remembers context from previous discussions, so you can continue where you left off.
• Personalizing responses: Responses match your preferred communication style and level of detail.
• Improving relevance: Recommendations and suggestions are tailored to your work focus areas and past requests.

View and edit memories in Settings

1. Click your profile icon and select Settings.
2. Select Personalization.
3. Review your memories organized by category. You can edit or delete individual entries.

Add memories from MCP-connected tools

MCP-connected tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, VS Code, and Copilot can add, update, and delete your Glean memories directly. Make sure your connected Glean MCP server exposes memory and memory_schema. The default server includes both.

To manage third-party memories using the MCP tools:

1. In your MCP host application, call memory_schema to understand the available categories, storage policies, filterable fields, writable fields, and whether search is enabled.

2. Call memory for CRUD operations:

{"action":"read","category":"Preferences"}

{"action":"add","category":"Preferences","memory_source":"Cursor","content":"User prefers dark mode","options":{"subcategory":"ui"}}

{"action":"update","category":"Preferences","memory_source":"Cursor","memory_id":"<existing_id>","content":"new content"}

{"action":"delete","memory_source":"Cursor","memory_id":"<existing_id>"}

3. To perform a CRUD operation, call the memory tool with the appropriate action and category. For example, here's how to update an existing memory:

   {
   "action": "update",
   "category": "Preferences",
   "memory_source": "Cursor",
   "memory_id": "existing-memory-id",
   "content": "User prefers very concise responses"
   }

Import memories from another AI tool

If you've built up context in another AI assistant, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, or Copilot, you can bring it into Glean so Assistant personalizes responses without you starting over. Glean gives you a prompt to run in the other tool, then saves what comes back as memories you can review or delete.

1. Click your profile icon and select Settings.
2. Select Personalization.
3. Click Import memories. Glean opens a pop-up with a ready-made prompt.
4. Copy the prompt and paste it into the other AI assistant.
5. Copy the assistant's reply and paste it back into the Glean chat.

Glean reviews the reply and saves your conversation context as memories. Imported memories appear in Settings → Personalization, where you can view or delete them like any other memory.

note

Importing memories isn't supported in Fast mode.

Add memories using chat

Tell Glean what to remember using natural language:

• "Remember that I prefer comprehensive responses in tabular format"
• "Remember that I work on the enterprise sales team"
• "Remember that I always want code examples in Python"

Glean confirms when it saves a memory.

View memories using chat

Ask Glean what it remembers about you to see the full picture of your stored context, then shape it in the same conversation:

• "What do you remember about me?"
• "Show me my saved memories"
• "Show me what you know about my current projects"

After Glean shows you what it has, you can refine it on the spot. For example, "Forget that I prefer bulleted responses" or "Remember that my role is now Staff Engineer."

Delete memories

You can delete individual memories or all memories:

Delete a specific memory:

• In Settings → Personalization, click the delete icon next to the memory you want to remove
• In chat, tell Glean: "Forget that I prefer responses in bulleted format"

Delete all memories:

• In Settings → Personalization, click Delete all to remove all memories in a category

note

When you delete a memory, Glean records the deletion and excludes it from future updates, so it won't reappear.

Runtime controls in chat

You can control memory usage during a conversation using natural language:

• "Don't use memory in this chat"
• "Use memory for this response"
• "What memories are you using right now?"

Privacy and security

Memory is designed with privacy and security as core principles:

• User-level data: Memories are stored at the individual user level. There is no cross-user memory sharing.
• No document access: Memory stores facts and preferences, not document content. Memory does not grant access to documents you don't have permission to view.
• Retention policies: Glean persists saved memories until you delete them. Glean maintains and updates extracted memories as living records as it learns from your activity, rather than deleting extracted memories on a fixed schedule. Older, less-relevant knowledge ages out over time.
• Sensitive data: The system does not extract sensitive personal attributes. Extraction is scoped to your work context and preferences.
• Admin controls: Memory is on by default for every organization on a supported deployment, and admins don't have an organization-level control to turn it off. See Memory and personalization configuration for details.

Known limitations

• Deployment availability: Memory is available for GCP deployments that use Glean Universal Key. Support for additional cloud environments is coming in future releases, and the Personalization section doesn't appear in Settings on deployments where memory isn't yet available.
• Writing profile section removed: The Writing profile section in Settings → Personalization has been temporarily removed. An updated memory experience with a more detailed view and improved ways to manage your preferences is coming soon.
• Possible duplication: You may see duplicate entries in memory views. Glean consolidates these over time.
• Timing: Glean consolidates new context on a daily basis, so newly learned memories may take up to about a day to appear.

Frequently asked questions

Chat history stores your previous conversations so you can reference them later. Memory extracts and stores durable facts, preferences, and context that persist across all conversations, not just within a single chat thread.

Yes, agents can access your memories to provide personalized responses, subject to the agent's configuration and your memory settings.

No. Memories are private to each user, and your admin cannot view individual user memories. For more information about admin configuration, see Memory and personalization configuration.