If 2023 was Glide’s Year of Power, 2024 was the year of refining and directing that power. This year, the Glide team worked on continued improvement, increasing capabilities, and sharpening our focus.
Improvements were made to the Glide platform, making features like Glide AI more performant and reliable. The Glide design system was updated to stay modern—and an AI component was added to give greater design freedom and flexibility. Glide data sources became faster, more robust, and more useable at scale, especially with increased AI capabilites.
To learn firsthand how customers were actually using their Glide apps and what they needed to grow, CEO David Siegel went on the 2024 CEO Road Show, visiting businesses across North America.
The community of Glide Experts saw explosive growth in numbers and revenue, giving customers the help they needed to develop essential solutions for their businesses. And Glide Solutions and AI agents helped make custom software more accessible to more businesses.
Before we move into 2025—already dubbed the Year of Intelligent Automation—let’s take a look back at what was accomplished this year. You can watch David’s year-end presentation above or read on for details on the features, events, and products launched in 2024.
Glide AI & the AI Custom Component
We started the year by investing more in Glide AI, upgrading to state-of-the-art models, reducing prices, and adding new functionality, such as the ability to process documents and images.
AI is now our most popular and fastest-growing integration by far, and a third of our revenue is produced by teams actively using the Glide AI integration.
AI Custom Component
To give Glide builders more creative freedom and flexibility, we also launched the AI Custom Component. This AI feature allows Glide builders to describe how they want the components in their Glide app to look and function, prompting the AI using text, voice, or even images.
The custom component is informed by Glide’s design system and takes into account your existing app design—including things like brand colors—to create attractive, functional components with a much broader range of functionality and appearance than was previously possible.
Glide Creator
Starting this week, Glide onboarding includes a new AI native builder experience called the Creator. The Creator speaks to you like a Glide Expert would, asking you about your requirements and use cases.
You can prompt it with natural language descriptions and select from its suggestions, which are based on your unique use case. Then, the creator works by mixing, matching, and rewriting high-level screens and features to give you a much better idea of how the software you need should look and function.
Security Certification: SOC 2 Type 2
In July, Glide completed its SOC 2 Type 2 Certification, following SOC 2 Type 1 earlier in the year. SOC 2 Certification is a rigorous third-party review of Glide’s platform and practices that show that it adheres to the highest standards of privacy and security. This is essential as larger, more mature businesses with more stringent security requirements adopt Glide. This gives them clarity on our security standards.
Dark Mode & Enhanced Usability
This year, Glide introduced Dark Mode with improved color contrast, better Dark accents, adaptive typography, and more cohesive form components—which enhanced both app aesthetics and usability.
Every year, Glide makes improvements to the managed design system so that your software looks as fresh as the day you created it. Most software begins aging as soon as it's created as our eyes and design standards change. That's why old software looks old. Making tiny refinements to the Glide design system on a regular basis ensures your apps look contemporary over time and never look outdated.
Redesigned Table & Data Grid Components
This year, Glide redesigned the Table Component. The new high-density data grids are essential as Glide is used for more demanding, data-intensive tasks. Now, Glide has a world-class table and data grid with as many columns as you need, and each column includes interactive controls like dropdowns, buttons, and checkboxes. You can now add dozens of columns to your tables and use new column types like Tags, Buttons, Choice, and Boolean.
These improvements make it easier for users to view and interact with their data and enable you to build more versatile apps. As part of this change, the Data Grid component provides a more spreadsheet-like experience for users who require a denser, edit-first interface.
Added live updates to Glide Big Tables
The major update that Big Tables got this year was live updates. Adding live updates means that when your data changes on the backend, or a user or other app makes a change, you instantly see that update reflected in your app. There is no need to refresh or reload to see fully up-to-date information.
Significant upgrades were made to Big Tables on AI-enabled data sources as well, including moving them to a new AI-enabled infrastructure. This makes it possible to bring advanced features like the ability to ask a question about a very large table full of knowledge and get a specific answer. These infrastructure changes will enable a slew of powerful AI capabilities in your data sources in the future. Keep an eye out for these updates in the new year.
Brought Column tagging to Layouts
We added Column Tagging to Glide in order to let you easily reference and combine multiple column values—including text, numbers, and images—directly in the property panel for Components and Actions using "@mention" tags.
This update makes it simpler to create data-driven messages in your apps and also allows you to interact with your information in more natural and meaningful ways—from generating contextually-aware outputs with Glide AI to creating personalized emails at scale.
Introducing Workflows (now in Beta)
Perhaps one of our most significant improvements in 2024 was upgrading Actions to Workflows, greatly expanding what’s possible with Glide. This feature is currently available in public Beta but will have a broader launch on January 8th. The Actions Editor is now named the Workflow Editor, reflecting its expanded capabilities.
Workflows let you create powerful backend automations that can run across tables, relations, and queries. Workflows have advanced capabilities like loops, nested conditions, and computed steps that can help automate away manual, repetitive tasks without needing human intervention.
They can be triggered on a schedule to create timed workflows, by a webhook to create a trigger from another app or software, and via Slack or Email, along with other triggers coming in the future.
Workflows are also key to enabling the next advancement in Glide apps. When you combine their automation with Glide’s AI capabilities, you gain the ability to create intelligent automation tools. These tools will automate much more of the repetitive work that bogs down businesses, and they are able to do it with more flexibility and better decision-making capacity. One particularly powerful use-case for intelligent automation is AI agents…
AI Agents & Solutions
This year, Glide also launched two products that help businesses get AI-enabled Glide tools and customized software solutions much faster.
Solutions
Not every business has the time, bandwidth, or expertise to build their own software. Or they simply need the speed that a skilled Expert can offer. That’s why Glide introduced Solutions this year. Glide matches businesses with skilled Experts or Agencies to explore their needs and build a fully customized solution they can deploy in weeks. Those businesses still get access to the benefits of custom Glide apps and the ability to iterate on and scale their custom software as their needs evolve.
AI Agents
Glide also introduced AI agents to give businesses quick, intelligent solutions to the labor-intensive parts of their processes. Agents are designed to solve specific problems and bottlenecks, using AI and automation to help relieve manual work and increase your team’s productivity. They can be deployed quickly and slotted into a business’s existing systems.
Glide has launched four this year:
Agent 001, Inspections—Flexible mobile apps use AI to help perform inspections anywhere from retail floors to manufacturing facilities to rental properties.
Agent 002, Resume Screener—Ingest and analyze large quantities of resumes quickly and get a head start identifying which candidates to spend the most time on. AI agent compares resumes to your job descriptions, ranks candidates, and suggests potential focus topics for interviews.
Agent 003, Invoice Processing—Spare your team the labor-intensive part of processing invoices by using an agent that automatically pulls invoices from a company inbox, matches them to vendors, and pushes them to your accounting software.
Agent 004, Contract Manager—Automatically log all company contracts in a central location where you can use AI to summarize contracts, use chat to get specific information quickly, and set up automated alerts for important milestones.
The Glide Experts who make it all possible
Glide Experts are also developing their businesses at a breakneck pace. We now count over 5,000 Experts in our community. They are closing bigger and better deals, deepening relationships with existing clients, and growing Glide Agencies well past six figures.
When we look at our customer base, 34% of revenue is attributed to teams that contain a Glide Expert. Customers who work with an Expert also expand to more use cases and utilize Glide more than those without. It’s clear that Expert-supported businesses are among the most successful on the platform, and we want to thank Experts for making those customers more successful than ever.
Certification Level 3 & AI Certification
We now have over 250 Experts who have passed various levels of Glide Certification. This year, we deepened the depth of Certification by launching Certification Level 3 and broadened it by adding the specialized AI Certification. Both will be required for Certified Expert status next year.
The Experts Accelerator
The first Experts Accelerator program recently wrapped, and 50 experts who wanted to become Certified were accelerated through that process. Participants got access to peer support, a variety of knowledgeable guest speakers, and all the resources they needed to pass Glide Certification. If you’re interested, keep an eye out for future Accelerator cohorts in the new year.
Partnerstack Up-and-Coming Partner of the Year
As a cherry on top, the Glide Experts Program was awarded Up-and-Coming Partner Program from Partnerstack, and our very own Brett Haralson was also nominated as a Partnerships Leader of the Year.
Events and Activities
This year, the Glide Team and our community kept things lively with in-person events, road trips, and meetups.
Innovators at Work Quiz—We published a quiz to help you understand your Innovation type and how it impacts the way you build with Glide. Take the quiz to learn what your Innovator Type is.
Miami Mixer—Our most attended meetup yet was held in March on a rooftop in Miami. One Glider even rode her motorcycle for three hours to be there and hang out with us.
Glideaway 2024 & Montréal Mixer—2024’s Glideway was held in Montréal this year. The Glide team discussed, developed, collaborated, and met up with Experts and customers at the Montréal Mixer.
The CEO Road Show—Glide CEO David Siegel spent time connecting in-person with customers this year, visiting businesses like Hunter Douglas in Rosarito, Westland Real Estate and Health-Ade Kombucha in Los Angeles, Odin Fashion in New York City, and more to learn more about how their businesses work and where they’re deploying their most powerful Glide tooling.
Brett on the Road—Brett went on the road, too, visiting Glide Experts across the Southern United States, learning more about their work, their clients, and how they are growing their businesses.
What’s Next? 2025: The Year of Intelligent Automation
Finally, as we close out the year, Glide is launching automated Workflows—completing the platform hat trick. Data. Interface. Workflows. All with AI woven in. These are the elements that make a complete, robust software platform. One that is capable of advanced work, like intelligent automation.
“All of the work that happens in between software systems, that's still very manual… this is the next opportunity for automation, and there's a new class of automation that's making all of this possible. We are calling it intelligent automation. You can think of intelligent automation as just the combination of workflow automation and the flexible capabilities of these new AI systems.” - David Siegel, Glide CEO
For 2025, Glide has three goals:
Improved first experience
Platform reliability & safety
AI agents for operations
“We spent two years deepening and rounding out the platform and making it more powerful, but we are always keeping in mind the new user. We want to make them more successful, more quickly, and we want them to see the premise and the power of Glide,” explained David during the event.
Glide is also going to invest in platform reliability and safety. More and more businesses are using Glide for business-critical functions. If Glide goes down or there's a bug, their business can stop. Glide takes this responsibility seriously and will keep Glide reliable and secure and improve the overall safety of the platform.
You will also see more AI agents addressing a broader range of business problems and ready to be deployed to solve them. Workflows will become more advanced and more capable, and businesses will begin to use intelligent automation to make Glide apps that solve problems that previously had no solution.
