How Upside Saves 2,000+ Hours Monthly and $1.2M in Lost Time with Glean
Upside, a Washington DC-based technology company, deployed Glean to solve the knowledge fragmentation that came with rapid growth. By connecting Google Drive, Slack, Jira, Confluence, and other tools into a single AI-powered search interface, Upside now saves more than 2,000 hours every month, has recovered more than $1.2M in value from reduced lost productivity, and achieved 92% employee adoption.
Impact
2,000+
Hours saved monthly
>$1.2M
Value of time saved
92%
Employee adoption rate
1 month
Time to company-wide rollout
Challenge
As Upside scaled rapidly, employees struggled to find information across disconnected tools — Google Drive, Slack, Jira, Confluence — resulting in duplicated documents, wasted time, and declining confidence in the team’s ability to access the knowledge needed to work efficiently.
Solution
Upside deployed Glean across the company in one month, connecting its full tool stack into a single AI-powered, permission-aware search interface that lets every employee find existing knowledge instantly rather than recreating it.
Tools & Technologies
What Leaders Say
“Our Google workspace became filled with recurring documents that were all kind of similar. People were just constantly reinventing the wheel.”
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Full Story
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.
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