The founder and CEO of US-based unicorn Glean has joined the growing debate about the threat posed by a worrying trend called ‘workslop’.
While the AI revolution has been hailed for the efficiencies it can bring to virtually any business, concerns have been raised about how it could be misused.
One growing trend is called ‘workslop’, described as AI-generated work that looks polished on first viewing but lacks any substance or depth.
Last year a study of more than 1,000 full-time desk workers in the US found an estimated 40 per cent had received workslop in the last month.
Now, one of the biggest names in US tech, has entered the debate.
Serial entrepreneur Arvind Jain is the founder and CEO of Glean, which he described as ‘Google inside your company’.
$7.2bn valuation
In September the company raised $150m in Series F funding that valued the AI business at $7.2bn.
Jain, who has been in Lisbon attending Web Summit, previously founded security and AI company Rubrik, which has a current market cap of $15bn on the New York Stock Exchange.
Unsurprisingly, Jain is a huge advocate of AI but warned that lazy behaviour can result in workslop.
He gave the hypothetical example of someone who uses AI to review and generate a 50-page document that they then pass off as their own work.
“Now I’ve shifted the burden of the task from me to you,” he explained. “I didn’t really do any review or analysis. You have to now review this 50-page of document produced by AI.
“Who knows how good it is or how bad it is. That’s one worry of AI.”
In February 2025, Glean announced it had achieved $100m ARR in three years and Jain said the growth story had continued on the back of continued demand for its AI-powered workplace intelligence.
Wearing his familiar Peaky Blinders-type cap, he told BusinessCloud: “We’re more than doubling the business every year, and we’ve already done that this year too.”
Glean’s technology helps staff find the information they need across an increasingly fragmented digital workspace.
Headquartered in Palo Alto, San Francisco, the unicorn now employs more than 1,000 people, including up to 30 in the UK.
Jain, a self-confessed fast food fan, said AI was driving some eye-watering valuations.
“There’s a lot of optimism in the industry when it comes to AI companies,” he said.
“They’re being valued very high relative to where the business today is, how much profit they generate and things like that.
“It’s for a good reason, because AI is a very powerful technology and is going to change the world.
“The world’s most valuable companies in the future are all going to be AI companies and that’s sort of what is driving this private market investment. Very high valuations.
Makes no sense
“And sometimes, you know, it does feel like it makes no sense. A company that has no business or a company that got started two weeks back, how can it be worth billions already?
“Multiple billion dollars of valuation on day one, before they’ve done anything. There is some over optimism.”
Jain, who previously spent 10 years as an engineer at Google, said solving problems remained his main motivation for launching Glean.
“Even in Google, we could never find anything internally,” he recalled. “We were making it easy for people to find stuff on the internet, but it was not easy for us internally to find things.
“That’s what drives me, build products that add value to people and make them more productive.”