The truth about enterprise AI agents (and how to get value from them)

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This article comes from Ryan Priem’s talk at our Washington, D.C. 2025 Generative AI Summit. Check out his full presentation and the wealth of OnDemand resources waiting for you.

What’s the point of AI if it doesn’t actually make your workday easier?

That’s the question I keep coming back to – and the one that ultimately brought me into the generative AI space. 

I’m Ryan Priem, and I lead sales for Glean here in the East. After more than two decades in tech, working in data and analytics at places like Snowflake and EMC, I saw something shift. Large language models weren’t just impressive – they were starting to offer real, measurable value.

But there’s a catch: value doesn’t come from the model alone. It comes from how well you apply it.

That’s what drew me to Glean. We’re focused on using AI to solve actual workplace problems. Whether it’s helping someone find the right document, answer a critical question, or automate a tedious task, we’re building AI that works the way people do.

This article is a walk-through of what that journey looks like and what it really takes to build useful, scalable agents that people actually want to use.

Let’s dive in.

What work AI systems actually do (and why they matter now)

We classify ourselves as a “work AI” company. What that means is we’re focused on three core use cases:

Find something. Think of enterprise search – Google-like capabilities across your entire data corpus. We’ve built 120+ native connectors that index everything from Slack and Teams to Confluence, Salesforce, and SharePoint.Answer something. This is where generative AI kicks in. It’s about providing accurate, relevant answers from within your organization’s ecosystem – like what Microsoft Copilot does, but across all your apps.Do something. This is the really exciting part: task automation. Whether it’s preparing for a meeting, writing follow-up notes, creating a social media post, or resolving a support ticket – these are the everyday things that slow people down. We help you automate them.

The key to all of this is reducing friction. If you can find the right doc in seconds, get the right answer immediately, and offload repetitive tasks to an agent, you can spend more time doing the high-impact work that actually moves the business forward.

What’s the point of AI if it doesn’t actually make your workday easier?