What Happens When Enterprise Search Meets On-Prem AI?
At Dell Tech World 2025, hosts Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman are joined by Sam Grocott, SVP of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies, and Jay Philip, VP, Partnerships & Alliances at Glean. They dive into their joint on-premises AI enterprise search and agent solution, discussing the transformative effects of merging secure infrastructure with AI innovation on the future of work. Hear about the origin of the Dell-Glean partnership, its impact, and opportunities for engagement as a potential lighthouse customer.
Key takeaways include:
🔹Strategic Collaboration for AI Transformation: The discussion explored the inception of Dell and Glean’s partnership, highlighting their shared vision to leverage AI for significant progress across key areas like Go-To-Market, Services, Supply Chain, and Product Development.
🔹Enterprise Solution Fueled by Internal Success: Dell’s own remarkable achievement in drastically reducing internal search times for sales teams with Glean’s AI led directly to the development of this joint, scalable, on-premises solution for broader enterprise adoption.
🔹On-Prem AI for Data Security & Compliance: A critical focus of the partnership is providing an on-premises AI enterprise search and agent solution. This ensures unparalleled data privacy and regulatory compliance, addressing paramount concerns for organizations handling sensitive information.
🔹Agentic Workflows to Boost Productivity: The conversation envisioned a paradigm shift in future workplaces, where agentic workflows and AI-driven automation enhance productivity, streamline operations, and empower deskless workers, all while maintaining robust security and control.
Learn more at Dell Technologies.
Watch the full video at Six Five Media, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.
Or listen to the audio here:
Disclaimer: Six Five On The Road is for information and entertainment purposes only. Over the course of this webcast, we may talk about companies that are publicly traded, and we may even reference that fact and their equity share price, but please do not take anything that we say as a recommendation about what you should do with your investment dollars. We are not investment advisors, and we ask that you do not treat us as such.
Transcript:
Patrick Moorhead: And The Six Five is On The Road here at Dell Tech World 2025. It has been an incredible show. We have heard about AI infrastructure, AI software, AI, pretty much everything, including services. Daniel?
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s been a great day so far. First day, very powerful stuff. Customer in focus. You know, we’ve had a number of the different businesses represented already here on the Six Five. You know, we’ve talked to Doug Schmitt on the services and obviously CIO side of the business. We’ve had Michael Dell, you know, coming straight off the keynote stage, Arthur Lewis talking infrastructure. Pat, and really every conversation thematically to your point has been very AI centric. But again, and I’ve said this before to everyone out there, I’m going to keep saying this throughout our Dell Tech World week. I love hearing us move from kind of this AI theme to AI practical brought to business, bringing value.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, and one of the practical elements is actually, I mean, I love the tech, don’t get me wrong, but enterprises have to get something out of it and with the petabytes of data that’s in the enterprise data estate, they need to find a way to get at it. And it seems like all the public cloud folks will say, hey, truckload all of your data to us and we will take care of it. The same thing with enterprise SaaS as well. But there are options to get access in an easy way, let’s say a search box on premises. And one of those is Glean. I am pleased to introduce Jay from Glean and Sam from Dell. Great to see you. Welcome to the Six Five.
Sam Grocott: I am super excited to be here.
Jay Philip: Yeah, great to be here.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s been a great week so far. It’s just day one, but it’s going to be action packed, Pat, like every year here at Dell Technologies World. Jay, you heard? Pat, I know Glean is moving fast and you know, I know it because more and more in the analyst inquiries and calls that I’m taking, people are bringing up Glean. So it’s not surprising to either of us that you’re here with us today. But as you’re in the process of going from, you know, where you are to the next phase, more and more people are probably hearing. But it’d also be good to give everyone kind of just a little background overview and maybe just a little bit about the partnership as you see it before we hear from Sam on the Dell side.
Jay Philip: Yeah, no, great, thank you and wonderful to be here with all of you today. Glean is a work AI platform that’s built on search. It also has assistance and it creates a powerful platform for companies to build AI applications and agents. As you said, we are growing very, very quickly, but the sector is growing quickly as well. But we think we’re well positioned to take advantage of the coming wave of AI value creation. And we do that really grounded in sort of a day one sort of focus on security and compliance. So that’s really built into our ethos. And we know that to get to the next horizon for Glean, we cannot go it alone in this market. And I think there’s so much that we share in common with Dell and that our partnership is very, very logical. And so combining Dell strengths and infrastructure and on premises and security and compliance with our AI solutions really unlocks a whole new horizon of value creation opportunity for Dell and Dell’s customers. So we’re excited to be here, excited for our partnership, and really thrilled to work together.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, so Dell was utilizing Glean internally. And in fact, I remember hearing from Doug Schmitt, that’s how I learned from Glean. But you quickly grew into a partner. I find that fascinating. Kind of try before you buy this type of mentality. What drove that transition?
Sam Grocott: Yeah, so just under two years ago, we started our modernization at Dell, which essentially said, hey, how are we going to take advantage of this big AI movement? And we have a really defined process that we put in place. Michael this morning talked about the 800 or so projects that we had going on in AI. Once we got organized, we said, okay, there’s really four big bets. We want to make supply chain, engineering services and go to market. I was tasked to help lead up the go to market modernization. So that’s how I got into this kind of role. Because in product marketing we create a tremendous amount of content for our go to market teams. And so as we kicked off and we looked at, okay, how are we going to modernize or go to market? One thing we had to look at is the data. You know, if you don’t have great data or good data hygiene or governance, bad data in, bad data out, no matter what technology you deploy. So we spent a little bit of time cleaning up the data, organizing that. What we found is that our data was spread everywhere.
Patrick Moorhead: Sure.
Sam Grocott: I mean, Dell is a 100,000 plus enterprise company, so we might be a little bit on the extreme, but I think it’s very common for any enterprise to just have data spread everywhere. So one of the big use cases we went after right away is how do we help our go to market team find the right data at the right time at the right place and then frankly put the smartest go to market agent or salesperson in your pocket on your mobile device or on your PC. That was a clear, low hanging fruit AI opportunity. And that’s where we said, okay, who are the main players there? And that’s how we found Glean.
Patrick Moorhead: Makes sense.
Daniel Newman: It’s really interesting though because what I’m hearing here is there’s an external sort of facing go to market and customer story, but this sounds like it’s really a Dell customer zero story.
Sam Grocott: Yes.
Daniel Newman: Can you elaborate a little bit on that, Sam? Because obviously a company of Dell size, you are going to have an endless barrage, me being one of them sometimes, of people that are going to try to sell you stuff. Right. Different companies, different technologies, you were making a very critical decision, trying to reorganize your data, scale. And I remember actually sitting at Dell Tech Worlds maybe or Dell’s Analyst Summit maybe a year ago and you guys talked about AI and are we going to go 1/10th meaning, you know, kind of like looking at efficiencies or are you going to 10x? Yeah, I mean it sounds like you guys are leaning more towards the grow, grow, grow with a little bit of efficiency. But like what was the ultimate sort of reason you selected a glean versus everything else that’s out there that does something like this?
Sam Grocott: Yeah. So once we identified the use case, Enterprise Search and Knowledge Assistant, we looked at frankly all the major players in the place and Glean just blew them away from a user experience standpoint. But then we had to really feel, okay, what’s the right way, most efficient way to deploy this to be successful? And we studied the usage patterns of our go to market teams. What we found is they were spending this enormous amount of time searching and looking for information, communicating that information and frankly sometimes creating more information, which drives me as a product marketer nuts making their own content. So we said, okay, we’re going to change that. And we really studied how much time they’re wasting and the productivity loss. They’re not spending time with customers or partners. And we said, okay, that’s going to be the metric that we’re going to look at and say how do we do this a much better way. Partnered with Glean. I mean frankly, we had a fully operational POC in 10 days.
Daniel Newman: Wow.
Sam Grocott: Brought that in house, looked at it, 10 days, gave the thumbs up and now we’re in production across thousands and thousands of users at Dell that We’re saving hours a week, which that means hours a week per person, that means thousands of hours per week of productivity back into the business. So the results have just been tremendous.
Patrick Moorhead: Can you help bring this to life? Like specifically what kind of data was this? So first of all, was it inside of the marketing group or beyond?
Sam Grocott: It’s mostly in the go to market. So predominantly in marketing and sales are the two data sets we went after first. And that was the data that frankly we saw the biggest opportunity to return productivity back to the business and say, hey look, let’s get the sellers selling more and not looking for content, communicating content or creating content. We needed to arm them with a search tool that would find the data immediately. They didn’t have to go hunting and pecking or looking. That also frankly gave them the answer to.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, so semantic search as an example, you come in, hey, show me the latest information you have on Dell PowerEdge 8 way server. Or you can ask questions about it.
Sam Grocott: Yeah. So, right now, for example, our entire salesforce can go into our, our, our Glean product and say, okay, hey, what’s the latest news at Dell Tech World? And they get it instantly in the right formats, in the right places. And then you can just say, hey, tell me what’s new? And it will actually tell you in natural language what’s new, what’s the highlights, what are the key features, all the products, including the Glean partnership. So yes, customer zero, we are benefiting from this, but from a partnership standpoint, we’re loving it internally. We see an opportunity to bring this now to the masses and our customers and our partners together with Glean and Dell together, packaging this up and selling it to our customers.
Daniel Newman: As an industry analyst or you know, CEOs of firms, I could glean a number of insights from a tool like this. But seriously, like, you know, when you have a large repository of research and data and content, I mean, Jay, where does this go though? Because in my mind, part of this to me becomes a really exciting opportunity for agents for generative technologies. Obviously you’re already generating kind of outputs as in the search and the text. But like I even think like, I need, you know, right now it’s like, what do I have in the future though? It could be like I need an asset that’s in this format that’s got, you know, limited words on the page, great graphics and imagery that can be, you know, easily shared. How does the future of work take what you’re doing now and help teams like Sam has, you know, get to the next level. What are some of the things you guys are thinking about doing there?
Jay Philip: Yeah, I mean so we are just at the very beginning of a massive productivity wave as it relates to knowledge workers. And we very much think that the future is going to include a very large human workforce as well as a very large digital workforce in the form of agents. And people are going to have these very, very powerful AI assistants and they’re going to be conductors of these assistants. And that will allow individual employees, whether you’re a salesperson or a computer programmer or a customer service agent to really focus on the highest value and highest impact tasks that you have. And again, I think we’ve just begun to scratch the surface. I think the future is going to be all about these assistants and agents. And I think where Dell and Glean coming together helps unlock that value, is really building that foundation, you know, of safe and secure data and information to build on. So we’re super excited about that future and it is very, very important. Right now there is a lot of noise in the marketplace. Everyone wants to jump right to agents and say oh we have agents, they’re great. But it’s important to do that very hard work and put that infrastructure in place. And I think Dell and Glean coming together, you know, we create that foundation for a lot of Dell’s customers to build on top of. So, we’re excited about that feature.
Sam Grocott: If I just jump on. So one of the key unlocks for us was we’re doing this on prem. So this is very different from your out of the box Glean experience for certain use cases and applications that require the most sensitive information. We’re building this on-prem so you can get the benefits of both the public cloud, the public LLMs, but also your own on-prem infrastructure so you can really share your most sensitive information with it to get the best outcomes. Let me give you an example. Imagine a world where your go to a market teams, say a sales team, they come in in the morning and they’ve got their Glean application running and it welcomes you with the morning coffee. Agents is the kind of way I think about it. What does that mean for a sales rep? It’s got 10 emails prepped, written for me, ready to send. It’s got my three meetings of the day pre populated with all the background information. It’s got my key next steps to move stuff specific accounts forward. And I just, while I’m drinking my cup of coffee I’m authorizing emails to be sold. I’m reviewing my meeting prep sessions. I’ve saved so much time and effort because it went actually and did the work for me versus me just asking it questions. That’s kind of phase one. Phase two is the agent is going to work as another team member of your go to market and it’s working 24/7 all night every weekend. It just keeps working. That’s where we really see the partnership going next is unlocking that agentic AI workflow that takes the productivity of our sales teams to the next level.
Patrick Moorhead: That strikes me as unique on two vectors. First of all, it’s on prem and not cloud. And the second is teeing up what it thinks you should do now. And I’ll call that human in the loop.
Daniel Newman: Right.
Patrick Moorhead: As opposed to it just goes off and does it. Right. It sends the emails, not just tees them up for you to authorize and send out. So two and a half years ago, Daniel and I were at what I think a lot of people consider the kickoff for generative AI. It was OpenAI and Microsoft. And the first thing that popped into my head was okay, we had a hard time getting data together for machine learning and stovepipe type of organizations. But now it has to address a lot wider aperture of data. What does the state of the data have to look like to get benefit from Glean?
Sam Grocott: Yeah, why don’t you take that first? I’ll tell you what Dell did.
Jay Philip: Yeah, I mean so Glean is built on a number of powerful technologies that goes and actually understands your data. It indexes it at a very granular level, it is permissions aware and it also recognizes sensitive data and how to manage it. And we have these very, very powerful knowledge graphs and personal graphs that go out and understand the relationships between data and individuals to really help individuals like access the data that they need to action a particular event or for particular inference or for analysis and deliver that information to them in a very personalized manner. So that’s really the foundation of Glean and how it works. And I think Scott mentioned 10 days for it to be active. But that’s the sort of plumbing and technology behind the scenes.
Sam Grocott: When we pointed the Glean technology at our existing data set, within 10 days we were getting all types of insights from it. But then we quickly realized, hey, you gotta put hardcore data hygiene data governance in place.
Patrick Moorhead: Right.
Sam Grocott: So the second project happened to the POC and said yes, we’re gonna go do this together as I had a major data cleanup project. So my product marketers and my governance team had to go through, get the old data out, make sure we put the right processes in, we didn’t have to change the way the data looked. Glean takes care of that. You just don’t want to put garbage in, garbage out. So we spent a good month cleaning up as we were waiting for the production deployment, just to make sure the data was in the right shape it needed to be.
Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, I mean GDPR elements of its customer data. But also, what’s worse than getting an email that says Dear Fred or Dear XX X, Y Y? I know that’s a very simple mail merge type of mistake, but customers know it. They’re going to know if there’s a mistake and they might never open up an email from you ever again if that’s the case.
Sam Grocott: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: I think the bottom line is that our expectations are and should be much higher. And we see a lot of mistakes by large companies that still miss basics in marketing. There is technology out there. There are companies, whether it’s a Glean number of others that you’re using, that can use AI power and accelerate what you’re getting done, do it with a level of efficiency and of course improve outcomes. But one thing I did here is the data estate, getting your data management, getting the data platform into good shape is going to make any of these tools.
Sam Grocott: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: Work much better. Sam, Jay. I want to thank you both so much for joining us here at Dell Technologies World 2025, The Six Five On The Road. Love having you. I think every year we’ve had this conversation. Jay, it was great to meet you. Learn a little bit more about Glean. I hope everybody out there’s checking out what they’re doing as well. We’ll see you both again, hopefully very soon.
Sam Grocott: Yep. Thank you, thank you.
Daniel Newman: And thank you so much for joining us here at Dell Technologies World. Dan Newman and Pat Moorhead here in the booth having these great conversations, but we’re going to take a little break, so we will see you all really soon.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.
