Glean Agents vs Microsoft Copilot: Which Enterprise AI Approach is Right for You?

This is the question we get asked more than almost any other: "Should we go with Copilot or look at something like Glean?"

It's a fair question. Both are enterprise AI platforms. Both promise to make your people more productive. Both have serious backing.

But the philosophies underneath are fundamentally different. And that difference matters more than most feature comparisons will tell you.

Two different starting points

Microsoft Copilot starts from the Microsoft ecosystem. It's deeply integrated into the tools you already use — Word, Excel, Teams, Outlook. If your organisation lives entirely inside Microsoft 365, Copilot can do impressive things within that world.

Glean starts from a different premise: your organisation doesn't live inside one ecosystem.

Most businesses we work with have Slack and Teams. Google Workspace and SharePoint. Salesforce and HubSpot. Confluence and Notion. Jira and Monday. The knowledge that makes your business run is scattered across dozens of systems, not neatly contained in one vendor's suite.

Glean connects to all of them. Over 100 integrations at last count. It builds a knowledge graph that maps the relationships between people, documents, and projects across your entire tech stack — not just the Microsoft corner of it.

The agent question

This is where the gap becomes significant.

Both platforms offer AI agents — automated workflows that can do real work, not just answer questions. But who builds those agents and how is where the approaches diverge sharply.

Microsoft's agent story leans heavily on developers. Power Automate, Azure AI Studio, custom connectors — these are powerful tools, but they require technical resources to build and maintain. For most organisations, that means a backlog, a ticket, and a wait.

Glean's agent story is built for business teams. The people closest to the work — operations, HR, finance, customer service — can build agents themselves without writing code. No developer required. No ticket. No backlog.

This isn't a small distinction. It's the difference between AI that scales with your IT team's capacity and AI that scales with your entire organisation's imagination.

We talk about this with clients constantly: spend time using AI tools in your business, not developing them.

Security and permissions

Both platforms take security seriously, but the approaches differ.

Copilot inherits Microsoft 365 permissions, which works well — provided your Microsoft permissions are well-maintained. In practice, many organisations have years of accumulated permission sprawl in SharePoint and OneDrive that they haven't cleaned up. Copilot will surface whatever those permissions allow, which can create uncomfortable surprises.

Glean inherits permissions from every connected system. If a document is accessible in Confluence, it's accessible through Glean. If it's restricted in Salesforce, it's restricted in Glean. No new permission model to manage. No migration required.

The knowledge graph difference

Copilot uses Microsoft Graph, which maps relationships within the Microsoft ecosystem. It knows who you emailed, what files you shared in Teams, which SharePoint sites you visit.

Glean builds a universal knowledge graph across all your systems. It understands that the Sarah who closed the deal in Salesforce is the same Sarah who wrote the implementation guide in Confluence and presented the quarterly review in Google Slides. That cross-system understanding is what makes Glean's search and AI responses genuinely contextual.

As we explored in our recent piece on ontology, this structural understanding of how your organisation actually works is what separates AI that helps from AI that hallucinates.

So which one?

The honest answer: it depends on your organisation.

Copilot makes sense if:

• Your organisation is deeply committed to the Microsoft ecosystem
• Most of your knowledge lives in SharePoint, Teams, and Outlook
• You have developer resources available for custom agent development
• You're comfortable with Microsoft's pricing model

Glean makes sense if:

• Your tech stack spans multiple vendors and platforms
• You want business teams to build their own AI agents
• Cross-system search and context is important
• You want to move fast without waiting for developer resources

In our experience across Australian and New Zealand enterprises, the second scenario is far more common. Very few organisations we work with live entirely inside one ecosystem. The ones that do still benefit from Glean's agent model, because it puts the power in the hands of the people who understand the work — not the people who understand the code.

What we'd suggest

Don't start with the tool. Start with the problem.

Where are your people losing time? What knowledge is trapped in systems that don't talk to each other? Who should be building the AI workflows — your developers, or the people doing the work?

If you'd like to talk through the comparison in the context of your specific stack and team, reach out to the JOURN3Y team. We implement Glean across Australia and New Zealand, and we're always happy to have an honest conversation about whether it's the right fit.