AlphaSense vs Glean

AlphaSense vs Glean: Key Differences

Glean is an enterprise search solution designed to help organizations efficiently access and utilize their internal knowledge and information. Here’s how it compares to AlphaSense and how you can choose the right platform for your business needs.

AlphaSense

AlphaSense is a secure, end-to-end market intelligence platform powered by generative AI, intended for financial research and business professionals looking to increase research productivity through AI and automation.

Consistently ranked as an industry leader by TrustRadius and G2, AlphaSense was also recognized by Forbes as a top 50 AI company in 2023.

After our latest Series E funding round, AlphaSense is now valued at $2.5 billion, allowing us to continue expanding our enterprise solution and building on our generative AI capabilities.

Here’s how our platform enables you to extract key insights and answers from both high-value internal and external content with the power of artificial intelligence—all on a single platform:

Extensive Out-of-the-Box Content Library

AlphaSense allows you to combine valuable internal content and 10,000+ private, public, premium, and proprietary external data sources into one platform. We have purpose-built our platform to keep teams up to speed on the relevant topics and companies driving their market.

Our external content sources include trade journals, news, and SEC and global filings.. AlphaSense users also have access to two premium and proprietary content offerings.

These are:

• Wall Street Insights® – A collection of broker research from Wall Street’s leading firms, covering global sector themes, industries, and companies from 1,000+ sell-side and independent firms, available within the AlphaSense platform. Research professionals can even preview the contents of a broker report, saving them wasted time and money on potentially fruitless research.
• Expert Insights – 185,000+ transcripts of one-on-one calls with industry experts, competitors, customers, professionals, and former and current executives, with the ability to conduct your own 1:1 expert calls for less.

In addition to these sources, you can upload and search through your own content. That includes:

• Internal research, notes, and presentations
• Investment memos and CIMs
• Meeting and conference notes
• Reports from industry and market intelligence providers
• Newsletters, web pages, and RSS feeds
• Email content
• Excel documents

AI Search & Summarization Technology

Our industry-leading suite of generative AI tools is purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights. Our proprietary AlphaSense Large Language Model (ASLLM)—trained specifically on business and financial data—matches or beats the leading third-party LLMs over 90% of the time.

Our suite of tools currently includes:

Smart Summaries

This feature allows you to glean instant earnings insights (reducing time spent on research during earnings season), quickly capture company outlook, and generate an expert-approved SWOT analysis straight from former competitors, partners, and employees. All Summaries provide you with citations to the exact snippets of text from where the summaries are sourced—combining high accuracy with easy verification.

Generative Search

Generative Search is a generative AI chat experience that transforms how users can extract insights from hundreds of millions of premium content sources. Whenever you search for information, Generative Search is there to summarize key company events, emerging topics, and industry-wide viewpoints. You can dig deeper into topics by asking Generative Search follow-up questions or choosing a suggested query.

Generative Grid

Our newest generative AI tool, Generative Grid, applies multiple genAI prompts on many documents at the same time to quickly provide organized answers to research questions at scale, in an easy-to-read table format. This enables clients to summarize documents using pre-built criteria to save time when executing repeatable workflows.

Generative Grid pulls data from both premium external documents in the AlphaSense platform and users’ internal content. From there, users can choose preset templates or create their own to automate routine workflows. Each summary provides a direct citation to the source material it was pulled from.

Smart Synonyms™

This unique feature is proprietary to AlphaSense and has the capability to understand both the keyword and search intent behind any of your queries, factoring in search results that include variations in business language. For example, a search for TAM might also bring back results on market size.

Relevancy Algorithm

AlphaSense’s advanced algorithm also eliminates noise (i.e., content with matching keywords but ultimately irrelevant to your specific search objective) and surfaces only the most relevant results. This algorithm saves you precious time and energy, allowing you to get straight to analysis and other high-level tasks.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis, a natural language processing (NLP)-based feature, parses through content and identifies nuances in the tone and subjective meaning of text. It then uses color coding to help readers identify the document’s positive, negative, and neutral sentiments.

This technology assigns each search term a numerical sentiment change score to help users track any slight change in market sentiments across time. Users can take advantage of it to make better-informed investment decisions and improve risk management strategies.

This feature can be instrumental in picking up on subtle sentiment shifts in expert interviews that go beyond expert-level commentary. But it can also be applied to company documents—such as earnings transcripts and company presentations—to gain much deeper insight into the perspective of an individual, company, or the market on a key topic.

Integration Capabilities

Through either an AlphaSense-managed solution in our secure cloud or a customer-managed solution in the cloud of your choice, customers can easily integrate content at enterprise scale through our Ingestion API or enterprise-grade connectors—like Microsoft 365/Sharepoint, Box, S3, and more. Enterprise Intelligence supports the upload and management of tens of millions of documents.

Our integration capabilities allow for even greater knowledge sharing with members across your organization and improve overall team productivity. Our proprietary AI technology allows you to search across all internal IP and external company content to find crucial insights, catching what other platforms miss in a secure and automated way.

Lastly, AlphaSense offers content processing and content management. Content processing allows company recognition within user documents, while content management features support custom tags and folder structures to better index and organize internal content.

Monitoring, Analysis, and Collaboration Tools

AlphaSense is designed to help users find insights faster. In order to do that, we offer a number of tools that extend beyond search and summarization to help accelerate research workflows.

• Customizable Dashboardscreate a centralized information hub for monitoring key companies and themes, while tailored real-time alerts provide real-time updates.
• Powerful collaboration tools like Notebook+ and commenting featureshelp teams manage and share insights more effectively.
• Table Tools allow you to streamline your quantitative analysis by enabling you to export modeled time-series data on company financials.
• Image Search allows you to discover insights buried in charts to quickly capture data without reading through pages of documents.
• Snippet Explorer allows you to effortlessly look at any topic or theme and all its historical mentions in a single view.
• Our Black-liningfeature allows you to automatically identify any QoQ changes in SEC filings.
• Automated Monitoringallows you to set up real-time alerts that send instant updates on any relevant market movements, news, emerging trends, and competitor activities. We also generate snapshots of companies and topics regularly that keep you ahead of the curve with actionable insights.

AlphaSense Pros

• Extensive content database that spans the four key perspectives, including broker research, expert calls, company documents, news & regulatory sites.
• Incorporates AI search technology, machine learning, and sentiment analysis
• Generative AI features, like Smart Summaries, for earnings and image search
• Automated and customizable alerts
• All-in-one research platform
• User-friendly interface
• Internal messaging and collaboration features
• Support for APIs and integrations
• Supports enterprise-level organizations and teams
• Enterprise-grade data production complying with global security standards: SOC2, ISO270001, FIPS 140-2, SAML 2.0
• Excellent customer support team, including 24/7 chat with product specialists, a live Help button on the website, and regular live AlphaSense Education webinars

AlphaSense Cons

• Visualization tools are limited at this time
• Collaboration tools are limited to users with AlphaSense licenses

Glean

Glean is an enterprise search and knowledge discovery tool for modern professionals. Founded in 2020 by a team of former Google engineers and industry veterans, Glean’s goal is to help teams more efficiently access and utilize their internal knowledge and data, ultimately improving productivity and knowledge sharing within the organization.

Like AlphaSense, Glean has been recognized as a leader in the space by G2 and was also named one of the top 50 AI companies by Forbes in 2023. Having recently completed a $100 million Series C funding round, Glean has over 70 customers across various industries including technology, media, education, and healthcare.

As an enterprise search platform, Glean enables organizations to search across various data sources within their internal systems—including documents, emails, databases, collaboration tools, and more. Customers refer to Glean as “Google for the internal workspace,” citing the powerful and customizable search functionality that helps find any topic, project, or technology at work.

In 2023, Glean launched a new suite of generative AI tools — based on their proprietary knowledge model—aiming to improve the accuracy and security of enterprise data and content, as well as enhance productivity and collaboration among teams.

Their main features include:

• Glean Assistant – Referred to as “ChatGPT for your enterprise”, this is a digital workplace assistant that can be used for engineering, sales, support, and other queries — pulling answers directly from internal company resources. Assistant also configures with Slack, so that Glean can answer questions raised in Slack channels
• AI Answers – NLP-based feature that draws from various sources of content, context, and permissions within an organization’s knowledge base to provide a single, concise answer to any query
• Expert Detection – Identifies and connects users with subject matter experts within their company, based on Glean’s analysis of content, activity, and relationships
• In-Context Recommendations – Provides relevant additional content and context to any asset users are working on, such as a document or presentation
• Deep Learning-Based Vector Search – With a semantic understanding of natural language queries, Glean’s search relevance continues to improve as the model becomes more trained on the company’s unique language and contex

The foundation for these features is Glean’s knowledge model, which is built on three pillars:

Company Knowledge and Context

For each company, Glean creates an enterprise knowledge graph, which understands all the content, people, and activity in an organization, as well as how each piece of information relates to one another. This allows Glean to understand each organization’s unique internal language and the specific collaborative relationships between workers.

Permissions and Data Governance

Glean is committed to complying with all real-time enterprise data permissions and governance rules. This means the platform ensures that each user only has access to information they are allowed to access.

Full Referenceability

Unlike models operating in black-box environments, Glean prioritizes transparency, ensuring that users always know exactly where each piece of information is coming from, as well as who is responsible for it.

Related Reading: Best Enterprise Search Software in 2024 (Buyer’s Guide)

Glean Pros

• Strong tool for searching and discovering any internal company information
• Powerful search functionality with limited filtering capabilities
• Generative AI features that make search faster, easier, and more precise
• Great collaboration and knowledge sharing features
• Integration with Slack allows for greater ease and efficiency with getting answers

Glean Cons

• Relatively new in the market; product is still developing and learning
• Not built for market research workflows
• Search capabilities are limited in terms of phrase matching and keyword proximity
• Relevancy score can be inaccurate, leading to sifting through irrelevant search results
• No proprietary or premium external content sets available on the platform
• Limited customization options, which may not be ideal for teams with unique needs
• No ability to set up customizable alerts