The tools meant to streamline work can leave businesses stuck in a maze of messages, documents, and dashboards.
Super.com, a travel and finance platform on which customers can book hotels and earn cash and rewards, depends on various workspace platforms, including Slack, Confluence, and GitLab, to keep the business humming.
Hussein Fazal, Super.com’s CEO, told Business Insider that juggling systems often slowed down day-to-day tasks. Documents, datasets, and message exchanges were scattered across platforms, which made it difficult for teams to access what they needed when they needed it.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company decided to permanently switch to remote work, which Fazal said added an extra challenge to information retrieval.
As a result, Super.com needed a central system to access information from all of its platforms.
“It’s hard to just pick up information, and it can sometimes even be hard to get information,” he said.
Super.com decided to build a hub that its employees could access from home. In 2022, the company teamed up with Glean, an AI startup in Palo Alto, California, to create a search platform that pulls information from across Super.com’s software programs.
Courtesy of Super.com
A personalized search tool
Enterprise search is software that allows users to look for information across various platforms and databases. Glean’s platform uses ranking algorithms and generative artificial intelligence to make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for.
“Glean will find the right information and produce an answer in natural language, à la ChatGPT, but with the information in the context of your enterprise,” Tamar Yehoshua, the president of product and technology at Glean, told BI.
She said that it’s not as straightforward as putting all the information together into one big pot. Different employees have different access permissions, so each search needs to be customized for whoever is using it.
Super.com integrated the company’s most-used apps and tools, such as Slack, Confluence, GitLab, and Google Drive, into one hub. “It’s personalized,” she said. “It will find the information that is more relevant to you, as opposed to me, if we’re in different roles and in different teams.”
Yehoshua said the setup process could be challenging since some companies struggle with managing who has access to which tools. This means that the software could give out confidential information to employees.
To fix this, Glean built a data-governance layer into the search platform, which ensures rigorous access permissions. Fazal said Super.com had never had an issue with Glean’s search tool giving people information they shouldn’t be allowed to see.
Yehoshua added that while everybody knows how to search Google, not everyone knows how to write a good AI prompt. Glean also launched a prompt library for Super.com, which she said helped educate people on how to use the tool.
Fazal said he uses the platform multiple times a day. He added that an internal company survey found the search platform has saved employees an average of 20 minutes a day, which adds up to more than 1,500 hours saved each month across the team. The employee survey also found a 20% reduction in onboarding time for new hires.
Next steps for AI agents
Since their first partnership, in 2022, Super.com and Glean have added features to the platform. A generative-AI tool embedded into the platform, for example, helps employees draft emails and prioritize tasks using real-time company data.
For instance, if an employee asks, “What are the 10 most important things I should be working on right now?” the AI assistant will use information from Slack and Google Docs to give a customized answer to that employee.
Looking ahead, Fazal hopes to incorporate AI agents into the platform. He said the next step after prompting AI to generate a task list would be getting an AI agent to go do those things. For instance, the AI assistant might suggest arranging a meeting as an important task. The agent would then draft emails and book a meeting room to help complete that task.
“We’re excited to test it out and implement that once it’s ready,” he said.