Glean Isn't Garbage, Here's the Real Reason Your AI Feels Brainless
By now you've probably heard of the 2025 MIT report which revealed that 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots are failing, not because the models were broken, but because they were drinking from tainted wells of messy, unmanaged content.
A lot of teams right now are scratching their heads:
“Why isn’t our shiny new AI giving us better answers?”
We hear it all the time, you’ve connected Glean or even Atlassian Rovo. You’ve got copilots and search tools plugged into Confluence and Jira. On paper, everything looks modern, sleek, and powerful. But then the results come back… muddy. Confusing. Often flat-out wrong.
It feels less like “AI magic” and more like you’re feeding your team from the back of the office fridge.
The real culprit: knowledge bloat
It’s not the AI’s fault. It’s the content you’re feeding it. Confluence is a goldmine for collaboration, but without care, it turns into a landfill:
- Old projects that no one archived.
- Duplicate pages that never got merged.
- Sensitive docs that should’ve been expired years ago.
- Content that shouldn’t be visible to everyone.
- Attachments from a past life still sitting there, waiting to show up in the wrong context.
And here’s the kicker: AI doesn’t know the difference.
To the model, outdated and authoritative look the same. So when it builds a response, it pulls from everything: the good, the bad, and the ugly. If you’ve ever watched your AI surface an old policy as if it were current, or pull a half-baked draft into an executive report, you’ve felt the pain. It isn’t just inconvenient, it’s risky. Outdated information becomes gospel in front of your team. Sensitive documents you thought were buried resurface in seconds. What should have been a breakthrough moment for AI instead becomes a liability.
The danger isn’t that AI hallucinates, it’s that it faithfully repeats what you’ve allowed to pile up. Garbage in, garbage out. And when that garbage leaks into customer conversations, compliance audits, or high-stakes decisions, the stakes get very real, very fast. If you’re in Sales, IT, compliance, or legal, you already know how dangerous that is.
That’s what we call Glean Garbage.
Disclaimer: we actually love Glean, but we’re finding organizations are rushing into new AI solutions without taking some necessary steps to let it shine. Turn that Glean Garbage into Glean Gold.
The fix: better information governance with Opus Guard
We built Content Retention Manager for this problem. Think of it less as another “feature” and more as a quiet, behind-the-scenes guardian for your knowledge base. It doesn’t just tidy up, it enforces the discipline most teams wish they had. Old pages expire and get removed when they should. Sensitive content is governed, not left to chance. The noise gets cleared away so that what’s left is sharp, accurate, and safe.
And when you finally see your AI working with clean, current knowledge? The difference is obvious. Glean is clean and Rovo is rocking it. The answers get sharper. The risks fade into the background. And the promise of AI—that feeling of “wow, this is actually helping” becomes real again.
Get your context window in order with Content Retention Management
One of the biggest shifts we’ve made with Opus Guard is putting power directly into the hands of employees, not just admins. With our new user audit view, every user can quickly review and clean up their own content, reducing clutter before it becomes a problem. Layered on top is data classification, which ensures pages and files are tagged against the right retention policies; no more guesswork about what stays, what expires, and what needs special handling. To make this even easier, we’ve introduced a Rovo AI Agent that guides employees in real time, helping them classify their work correctly according to company rules. Behind it all runs our audit log, a trusted, tamper-proof record that proves exactly what was done and when, giving legal and compliance teams the peace of mind they need. Together, these features don’t just clean up your knowledge base, they build a culture of accountability, accuracy, and compliance across the entire organization.
You didn’t pay for AI to amplify chaos. You paid for it to make sense of your knowledge base.
When you take out the garbage, the answers finally start making sense.
👉 Start your 30‑day free trial via Atlassian Marketplace now
👉 Need a walkthrough? Book a demo with our retention specialists
