Our Partner Discovery Story－Glean

Drawing on the discerning eye for software that we have cultivated since our founding, Ashisuto delivers 71 products (as of April 2025) to enterprise customers in Japan as a value-added reseller. In this article, we share the story of how the “B-Dash Committee”—Ashisuto’s dedicated team for sourcing and evaluating new products—selected Glean for customers exploring the use of generative AI.

Glean is a generative AI–powered enterprise search solution offered by U.S.-based Glean Technologies, Inc. Using state-of-the-art AI, it accurately interprets context—including company-specific acronyms, abbreviations, and code names that conventional document search often struggles to handle—and returns results that match what users are looking for. This dramatically reduces the time needed to access internal information and knowledge, contributing to greater productivity.

As the first reseller in Japan, Ashisuto began offering Glean in May 2023. The year 2023 saw dramatic advances in generative AI technology, along with rising expectations for greater operational efficiency and value creation. Conversational services such as ChatGPT spread rapidly, and Ashisuto itself fielded more than 3,000 generative AI–related inquiries that year. Incorporating daily updates and passing them on to customers had become part of our everyday work, so being able to launch Glean at this moment allowed us to meet our customers’ needs precisely when they arose.

Glean was well positioned to benefit from the growing momentum around generative AI—but how did Ashisuto discover it in the first place?

In fact, generative AI was not what led us to Glean. In the summer of 2021—two years before the generative AI boom—the B-Dash Committee was focused on BtoE, or employee-focused solutions.

One reason employee-facing solutions became a focus was the information silos—imbalances and breakdowns in sharing information both inside and outside organizations— that emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, Ashisuto introduced a concept called the “Internet of Knowledge,” designed to strengthen human connections through shared knowledge, and formalized it as a solution in 2020. As a next step, we believed that reinforcing and complementing the Internet of Knowledge could raise employee satisfaction and motivation and, in turn, improve the company's overall performance.

The B-Dash Committee identified four focus areas for employee-facing solutions: enterprise search, knowledge management, virtual workplace, and employee engagement. A dedicated working group was set up for each, and the Enterprise Search working group ultimately led the evaluation of Glean.

Back in 2021, as the working group carried out its evaluation, the enterprise search market already included several products known for well over a decade, yet there was no clear, dominant winner. Even so, we saw the appeal: if innovative technology could instantly pull the information you truly wanted from a company’s internal data—and deliver that experience through a single search box—it would offer great value to both Ashisuto and our customers. With that expectation, we decided to start by examining the products most highly regarded worldwide.

After evaluating four or five products, however, we ran into issues with usability, cost, and vendor responsiveness, and none proved to be the ideal product for Ashisuto. We even began to wonder whether, if we still could not find software that would truly help our customers, we might have no choice but to develop the ideal product ourselves.

It was May 2022, and the ideal product had still proved elusive. One member, who made a habit of scanning industry funding news, came across a report about a major funding round for Glean. Sensing that Glean might embody the very vision of enterprise search we had been looking for, we reached out through Glean’s website and received a reply that same day. This was the beginning of a close relationship with the Glean team, who would go on to work closely with Ashisuto; the way this contact and the rest of the Glean team responded gave us real confidence in them as a company. After many rounds of discussion with Glean and thorough investigation and verification of the product’s features and concept, we concluded that it was an outstanding product capable of bringing Ashisuto’s vision to life.

We recognized early on that Glean was an excellent product, but to verify it further, we conducted an internal PoC (proof of concept). Since this is an employee-facing solution, we felt that using it ourselves—and then sharing that experience with customers—would make the product’s appeal easier to convey. And because adopting a new product is itself a challenge for customers, we also wanted to offer candid, first-hand impressions from the standpoint of people taking on that same challenge. To begin, we launched a three-month trial starting with around 100 sales representatives using it to search for internal information.

Throughout the PoC, we monitored usage regularly. The results showed that the vast majority responded very positively to Glean, and it was striking that a number of especially enthusiastic Glean fans emerged. With many strong requests such as “I can’t work without Glean anymore” and “You absolutely have to roll this out company-wide,” and with a firm sense that it was a genuinely useful tool for all employees, we decided to deploy Glean company-wide so that people could keep using it even after the PoC ended.

Once we rolled Glean out across the company, however, we found that some employees remained reluctant to use it—citing concerns about having yet another tool to learn, doubts about search accuracy, and questions about whether security and privacy were sufficiently protected. To address this, we launched a company-wide initiative called “1GAN,” placing evangelists in each department and building a support structure that assisted employees one-on-one with questions about how to use the tool and the accuracy of its results, so that employees across the company could use it with confidence.

Through these efforts, we were ready to introduce Glean to customers as an official Ashisuto offering.

And so, in May 2023, Ashisuto officially began offering Glean to customers as the first reseller in Japan. This timing coincided with the rapid development of the generative AI field. Because the Glean team had built the product with a clear vision of a generative-AI world in mind, Glean released its generative AI integration far earlier than most other enterprise products on the market. This release aligned perfectly with the broader surge in generative AI interest. As this integration further improved the speed and accuracy of Glean’s search engine, Ashisuto began referring to it as the “Insight Engine” to distinguish it from other products. Based on what we learned from our internal PoC, we worked to clearly and thoughtfully communicate Glean’s strengths to customers. The ease of use of the user interface and the breadth of data it can ingest are of course part of the appeal, but above all, many customers have praised it for its remarkably high search accuracy.

We asked members of the B-Dash Committee about the key points behind this Glean initiative and their reflections on it.

Bringing Glean to the Japanese market went remarkably smoothly and at an unprecedented pace—just one year from our first encounter to officially offering it to customers. Through this experience, we came to appreciate that the three key factors in the B-Dash Committee’s decision to take on a new product are timing, the responsiveness of the vendor’s main contact, and the appeal of the product itself.

Conducting an internal PoC was also one of the reasons we were able to start offering the product so quickly, as it let us experience its appeal and best uses firsthand. Going forward, we will continue working to make Ashisuto’s experience useful to customers as they assess a product's value.

As a committee committed to identifying high-value software, the B-Dash Committee will continue to deepen its understanding of the challenges our customers face and explore ways to deliver value through software. We will also strengthen our collaboration with software vendors and work harder to ensure that customer feedback reaches them, so that more customers can use these products with confidence.