How Upside Saves 2,000+ Hours Monthly and $1.2M in Lost Time with Glean

Upside is a technology company headquartered in Washington, DC. As the company scaled rapidly, its knowledge became dispersed across a growing collection of digital tools — Google Drive, Slack, Jira, Confluence, and others. Despite having strong collaboration platforms, internal pulse surveys told a different story: employee confidence in their ability to find what they needed was declining.

The practical consequence was duplication. Employees spent time recreating documents that already existed somewhere in the system, not because they were careless, but because finding existing work was slower than starting over. Elizabeth Vaggelatos, Head of Knowledge Management at Upside, described the pattern plainly: the Google workspace had filled up with recurring documents that were all roughly similar, with people constantly reinventing the wheel. The problem was not a lack of documentation — it was discoverability.

Upside piloted Glean with a subset of employees before rolling it out company-wide in a single month. Glean connected to every existing tool and provided AI-powered, permission-aware search across all of them from one interface. Employees no longer had to guess which tool to open first — they queried Glean and got relevant results drawn from wherever the information lived. Adoption spread across every department, from Engineering to Sales, and the onboarding experience improved as new hires could navigate the knowledge base without relying on institutional knowledge from colleagues.

The results were concrete. Upside employees now save more than 2,000 hours every month that would otherwise go to searching for information or recreating existing work. The cumulative value of that recovered time exceeds $1.2M. Company-wide adoption reached 92%, a figure that reflects sustained utility rather than mandated use — employees chose to keep using it because it worked.

Upside’s experience reflects a pattern common to fast-growing companies: the problem is not a shortage of information but a shortage of findability. Glean addressed this by making every data source equally searchable from one place. At 92% adoption and over 2,000 hours saved per month, the behavior change has become self-sustaining.