Arvind Jain, founder and chief executive of Glean, has said artificial intelligence (AI) remains far from replacing human workers, arguing that most companies are still struggling to get employees comfortable using the technology effectively. He also said that AI should be viewed as a workplace assistant rather than a replacement for people. 

"When we started the company seven years back, AI was actually not as powerful as it is today. And so we never really thought about this as anything more than a tool, an assistant that can actually help us, maybe go a little bit faster in work that we do," he said while speaking at the Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit.

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Jain, an IIT Delhi graduate with a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Washington, founded Glean after co-founding Rubrik and spending more than a decade at Google, where he worked across Search, Maps, and YouTube.

The tech CEO said Glean initially focused on helping employees find information more easily inside organisations, but advances in AI now allow software to answer questions and handle portions of work on behalf of employees.

"But it's still not at a place where it replaces you. Not even close," he said. "I don't think AI forever...hopefully forever too...where AI never replaces any human. And it just actually augments us, enables us, allows us to do higher quality work and more work in the same amount of time."

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Jain said that despite growing anxiety around automation, he was not seeing widespread job elimination across large enterprises. "There are many who will talk about how you can replace this role with AI or that role with AI. But practically, like we work with the largest enterprises in the world, and we're not seeing any role getting eliminated. Not today," he said.

He argued that most companies remain in the early stages of AI adoption and are still focused on educating workers rather than redesigning jobs. "The number one thing is, can you make people feel comfortable with AI? Can you actually make them not fear AI? Can they think of it not as an adversary but rather as an assistant, as a companion, as a colleague of theirs?" Jain said.

According to the top executive, even among major enterprises and AI-focused companies, only a small share of workers are using AI tools in ways that significantly improve productivity. "We see only 10% of the people effectively use AI today and totally change their day-to-day work with it - and actually move like, say 20%-50% faster," he said, adding that most employees still use AI for basic information searches because "they don't even know what AI is capable of."

Addressing concerns over layoffs linked to AI adoption, Jain said companies need clear messaging from leadership about how they intend to deploy the technology. "One of the common things that you probably hear all the time is that you're not going to lose your job because of AI, you're going to lose it because there's somebody else who uses AI more than you," he said.

Jain said organisations broadly face three choices: use AI to shrink workforces, use it to make employees more productive and build more products, or focus first on understanding how to use the technology effectively. "At a large organisational level, I do think there has to be a good sort of top-down like messaging on like what is your company's strategy when it comes to AI?" he said.

Referring to Glean's own workforce, Jain said the company had no plans to use AI to reduce headcount. "We are growing," he said. "Ultimately, people - the company is nothing more than its people. People are the ones that bring value...there is no interest that we have internally in terms of figuring out how we can actually shrink."
 

Published on: May 21, 2026 2:18 PM IST