The challenge
As Confluent scaled from 250 to over 2,000 employees, finding critical information across 20+ systems became increasingly difficult. Employees reported that essential knowledge was scattered across tools, slowing them down and impacting productivity.
An internal survey confirmed the issue: employees struggled to find the information they needed to do their jobs. Support, Customer Success, and Sales Engineering teams were hit hardest, leading to inefficiencies and frustration.
"We had a lot of sand in our gears when it came to finding information," said Manu Narayan, Chief of Staff at Confluent. "Our challenge wasn’t having too many duplicative tools — it was that knowledge was spread across best-of-breed systems."
The solution
Confluent adopted Glean’s AI-powered search to give employees instant access to the information they needed. Instead of spending time searching across multiple apps, teams could surface relevant documents, past deal cycles, help articles, and even Slack messages — all in one place. "Looking back on the hundreds of technology projects we’ve led internally, Glean was high impact and low effort," said Shahan Parshad, VP of Business Technology & Data at Confluent.
Glean indexed Confluent’s 20+ tools, including Slack, Salesforce, and Confluence, with minimal setup. Teams quickly saw results:
- Faster support resolutions: Technical Support teams reduced investigation time per ticket by 5–10 minutes, improving response times.
- Improved knowledge sharing: Account executives saved hours by easily accessing past deal cycles, eliminating redundant work.
- Stronger onboarding: New hires used Glean as their go-to knowledge source, helping them ramp up faster.
"Without Glean, it would be tiresome to search across resources and find required results," said Pulkit Bhardwaj, Technical Support Engineer at Confluent. "It reduced investigation time per ticket by 5–10 minutes and sped up customer response time by at least 5 minutes."
Today, more than 70% of Confluent employees actively use Glean — a higher adoption rate than many other internal SaaS tools.
What’s next
With strong adoption across teams, Confluent continues to expand its use of Glean by rolling out features like Announcements, Collections, and Answers. The company is also rolling out Go Links by Glean, projected to save thousands of dollars annually.
"The challenge we had around information sprawl — something that could have taken years or months for a massive wiki reorganization and data governance to solve — was at least 80% solved by introducing Glean’s search tool," said Shahan Parshad.
About Confluent
With 2,000+ employees and 4000+ customers, Confluent is pioneering a fundamentally new category of data infrastructure focused on data in motion. Their cloud-native data streaming platform is designed to unleash real-time data. It acts as a central nervous system in companies, letting them connect all applications and data around real-time streams and react and respond intelligently to everything that happens in the business.
