Beyond Prompt Engineering: The Real Drivers of Token Efficiency in Enterprise AI
Glean, Friday, June 19th, 2026
Glean argues that real token efficiency in enterprise AI comes from retrieval quality and orchestration, not prompt trimming.
This Glean blog post argues that enterprise AI teams often optimize the wrong thing by focusing on shortening prompts. The real gains in token efficiency, it contends, come from what happens before the model sees a prompt: retrieval quality, context selection, and orchestration design.
The piece frames token optimization as a systems architecture discipline spanning four layers: improving retrieval precision, passing only relevant evidence, structuring clear prompts, and intelligently orchestrating multi-step workflows. The result is strong outcomes using minimal necessary context.