As AI use expands, platforms like Brain Max seek to simplify cross-app integration

As more companies choose to bring generative AI tools into their workflows, the number of AI applications they need to connect to their stack increases. An emerging trend brings more visibility into all these applications in one place, allowing enterprises to query, search, and monitor their data and AI applications without needing to open additional windows.

Platforms like Galaxy, Glean, Elastic, and even Google have begun offering enterprises a way to connect their information and conduct searches in a centralized location. OpenAI has updated ChatGPT to access certain applications, while Anthropic now allows Claude to search users’ Google Workspaces.

The newest entrant into the space is ClickUp, with its new Brain Max platform that lets users query their data stored in Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint and others, manage support tickets and emails and set up agentic systems.

Zeb Evans, founder and CEO of ClickUp, told VentureBeat that the goal was to increase productivity and allow customers to continue using AI in the same way they’ve always done, without needing to open other applications to do so.

“People within companies are all using their different models with and without security clearance and are switching between different applications to use those models and core applications for work,” Evans said.

Evans pointed out that their customers often switched between applications when they wanted to write a prompt related to their work. For example, a user would be working on a project on GitHub or a Word document. They would sometimes copy their work to ChatGPT to ask a query and bring more context to their request. Evans said the goal of Brain Max and other all-in-one platforms is to reduce window switching and launch enterprise search, where all their data integrations are already located. It would also help in training and building agents, as the agent can tap into ClickUp and retrieve the necessary information.

Evans said that because document storage systems like Google Drive or SharePoint are already integrated into ClickUp, the large language models embedded in Brain Max do not need to interact with the APIs of those applications. It just searches Brain Max and ClickUp itself.

One reason these more deeply integrated, all-in-one platforms are gaining popularity is the importance of context. For enterprise search and agents to function effectively, they require a deeper understanding of what they are searching for. All of this context helps grow the trend of Deep Research, but ClickUp posits that this kind of enterprise search is better served if all the information is in one place, with permissions already in place.

One of ClickUp’s earliest customers for Brain Max is healthcare solutions company MPAssist. Enrico Mayor, cofounder of MPAssist, said it has helped streamline how employees find information.

“Brain Max is like ChatGPT, but it knows everything about our company. For us, it’s powerful because we use the chat in there, we have our boards in here, and basically manage the whole company here. We have literally everything in there for the whole company, and I can just kind of ask it anything and figure out what’s going on right now,” Mayor said.

Mayor said MPAssist had been using other applications to try and manage their workflow but has fully moved to ClickUp.

According to Mayor, the ability to ask questions about their company has also helped cut down the number of requests his employees escalate to him because they can readily find that information.

ClickUp’s Evans said they designed Brain Max to aggregate all of the “latest and greatest AI models in one place.” However, ClickUp has also developed its own model, called Brain, which optimizes the best model to use for user requests.

“When you have an agent that is connected to Google Drive, for example, that agent’s not gonna be aware that you have access to different files than I do,” Evans said. “The way that we’ve built our infrastructure is that it is aware of all of the files that you have access to and the ones that we don’t have access to, because we’re able to synchronize them in a universal data model and ensure that the permissions are also synchronized.”