2026-05-07 –, Main Stage
Search has a new User Interface! All search will be Agentic/RAG and delivered through a chat interface! The days of the monolithic search engine are over!
Well, there’s certainly a lot of hype that would say that. How much is true? As we go forward into a world dominated by AI-powered search, what are the key elements of search that will remain? Do we still need the inverted index? Will agents replace user behavior capture and signal boosting? Do we still need BM25 and other ranking algorithms, or will multi-agent swarms and search workflows obviate the need for statistical methods of ranking? Where does the search function live in the stack of tomorrow and how can we build for the future today? Come to this panel discussion to hear our take on these fundamental questions.
Trey Grainger is lead author of the book AI-Powered Search (Manning 2025) and founder of Searchkernel, a software consultancy building the next generation of AI-powered search. He also serves as a technical advisor at OpenSource Connections.
He previously served as CTO of Presearch, a decentralized web search engine, and as Chief Algorithms Officer and SVP of Engineering at Lucidworks, a search company whose technology powers hundreds of the world’s leading organizations. Trey is also co-author of the book Solr in Action (Manning 2014), as well as over a dozen other publications including books, journals, and research papers. Trey has 18 years of experience in search and data science focused on building self-learning search platforms integrating the most successful AI Search techniques.
Trey teaches AI Search in the course AI-Powered Search: Modern Retrieval for Humans & Agents with Doug Turnbull.
As Chief Strategy Officer at OSC, René is focused on technical strategy and fulfilling the needs of our clients.
René has worked in search for almost two decades, including on projects for some of the top 10 German e-commerce sites. He is co-founder and co-organiser of MICES (Mix-Camp E-commerce Search), an event that brings together the e-commerce search community each year. His technological focus is on OpenSearch, Elasticsearch and Lucene. He created and maintains the Querqy open source library for query rewriting.
Jon Handler is a Senior Principal Solutions Architect on the OpenSearch Service team at Amazon Web Services, based in Palo Alto, CA. Jon works closely with OpenSearch and Amazon OpenSearch Service, providing help and guidance to a broad range of customers who have search and log analytics workloads for OpenSearch. Prior to joining AWS, Jon’s career as a software developer included four years of coding a large-scale, eCommerce search engine. Jon holds a Bachelor of the Arts from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Master of Science and a Ph. D. in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from Northwestern University.