How Confluent Saves 15,000+ Hours a Month with Glean

Confluent is a data streaming platform company built on Apache Kafka, with more than 2,000 employees and over 4,000 customers. As Confluent scaled rapidly from 250 employees, its knowledge base became distributed across more than 20 tools — Slack, Salesforce, Confluence, and others. An internal survey confirmed what employees were already experiencing: finding the information needed to do their jobs had become genuinely difficult. Support, Customer Success, and Sales Engineering teams were hit hardest, as their work depended heavily on fast access to past context — deal cycles, product documentation, troubleshooting guides, and customer history.

Manu Narayan, Chief of Staff at Confluent, described the challenge plainly: there was a lot of sand in the gears when it came to finding information. The problem was not too many redundant tools — Confluent had deliberately chosen best-of-breed systems for each function — but that knowledge was scattered across all of them with no unified way to retrieve it.

Confluent adopted Glean's AI-powered enterprise search to give employees instant access to information across their entire tool stack. Glean indexed 20+ applications with minimal setup, and the impact was immediate across multiple teams. The Technical Support team reduced investigation time per support ticket by 5 to 10 minutes, directly accelerating customer response times by at least 5 minutes. Account executives could surface past deal cycles instantly, eliminating redundant work. New hires used Glean as their primary onboarding tool, reducing their dependency on colleagues and institutional memory.

Shahan Parshad, VP of Business Technology and Data, noted that the problem of information sprawl — one that could have taken a major wiki reorganization and data governance overhaul to address — was approximately 80% solved by introducing Glean's search capability. Today, more than 70% of Confluent employees actively use Glean, a higher adoption rate than many other internal SaaS tools at the company. The platform saves 15,000+ hours per month across the company, and support team satisfaction around information access has increased by 13%.

Confluent continues to expand its use of Glean, rolling out features including Announcements, Collections, and Answers, as well as Go Links by Glean — projected to save thousands of dollars annually through improved link management.