We all know that Slack is a rich source of knowledge in a company - a constant exchange of conversations, information, and documentation.

However, it is also a source of chaos. People ask questions and get blocked on finding answers. At the same time, teammates spend time and effort manually answering questions. Gleanbot addresses both of these problems. It jumps in automatically when it knows the answer to a question, and it responds when tagged by name.
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You can configure Gleanbot in Workspace Settings > Apps > Slack > Gleanbot.

When a teammate asks a question in a Slack channel, and Gleanbot is enabled in that channel, it can jump in with a helpful answer.

Let’s dive into how this works. When Gleanbot has detected that someone asked a question, it searches across all the knowledge in the company - previous Slack messages, knowledge articles, etc. - to generate a response to the person’s question. This is entirely automatic.

The answer is shown privately to the person who asked the question, and just like Glean Search and Glean Chat, it respects the content permissions of that person. In other words, answers are personalized and only based on content that you have access to. If the response was helpful, you can choose to share it publicly. If it wasn’t helpful, you can mark it as "Not helpful" to help Gleanbot get better.

Gleanbot won’t respond to every single question, but rather only responds when it has a confident answer. This is by design, to avoid creating noise. Specifically, Gleanbot only responds automatically when all of the following conditions are met:

Gleanbot adds reactions to the original message where it detected a question, to let teammates know it might have a relevant suggestion. By default, the reactions are:

The choice of emojis can be customized - see Set up instructions below. Reactions will only appear in channels where Gleanbot is explicitly added.

If you want a guaranteed response from Gleanbot in a channel or a thread, you can tag @Glean explicitly, asking the bot to answer a question, summarize a thread, or anything else.

As always, Glean’s response is personalized to the person who asked the question, and only based on content that person has permission to access.

In addition to answering questions, Gleanbot also lets you search Glean directly within Slack. Simply type /glean followed by your search query in any channel. The results will only be visible to you, and you have the option to share search results publicly.

This feature is enabled by default, and can't be modified. It is available to all Glean customers who have installed Glean’s Slack app, and it does not require Glean Assistant access.

As part of configuration, you will need to deploy the Glean app in Slack. The scopes required for the Glean app are provided in the Slack Workspace Setup page: https://app.glean.com/admin/setup/apps/slack/slack > Setup > Create an App.

Then, to set up Gleanbot, navigate to Workspace Settings > Setup > Apps > Slack. On the Gleanbot tab, toggle on “Respond to @Glean in Slack” and "Automatically respond to questions in Slack”.

Enter or select the channels in which you want to enable Gleanbot. Then, add Glean to each of these channels within Slack. See Slack’s instructions for how to add apps to a channel.

You can also manually enter channels as channel IDs under the "Advanced" dropdown.

To find a channel's channel ID, go to the channel in Slack and click on the channel name in the top bar. In the modal that appears, scroll down to the bottom of the "About" tab. Copy the channel ID shown and paste it into Glean.

Gleanbot uses Glean Assistant and generative AI under the hood. If you are using Glean’s Azure OpenAI key, there is no additional cost to you. If you are using your own key, then turning on automatic answers in channels incurs cost. Please work with Glean sales or customer success to get an estimated range of the cost, depending on the number of channels in which you enable Gleanbot.