Glean’s AI assistant uses 70% fewer tokens than Anthropic’s Claude Cowork

Enterprise AI spending is becoming its own line-item crisis for corporate finance teams, and Glean just showed up with a calculator. The company announced on August 26, 2026, that its AI Assistant consumed 70% fewer tokens than Anthropic’s Claude Cowork across more than 180 enterprise tasks, translating that efficiency gap into an 81% reduction in per-task token costs. The numbers are specific enough to take seriously. Glean’s platform averaged $0.58 per task in token costs. Claude Cowork averaged $2.98 for the same work. How Glean pulls off the efficiency The core mechanism behind Glean’s token savings is what the company calls a pre-indexed, permission-aware context graph. Because Glean pre-indexes enterprise data and tracks permissions in real time, it can retrieve relevant context without repeatedly querying expensive models from scratch. That pre-indexed structure connects more than 275 business applications and maintains a live knowledge layer across them. The second lever is model routing. Rather than defaulting every query to a premium frontier model, Glean automatically routes requests across more than 40 different models, selecting cheaper alternatives when the task doesn...