Haystack EU 2026 will be held on 15-16 September in Berlin, Germany.
At Haystack, we want to hear from practitioners from around the world who are tackling hard search & AI problems. While search continues to serve many classical retrieval use cases, it has also has become a key enabler for generative AI. Our attendees want to hear all about this evolution, from the big picture business decisions down to the nuts and bolts of selecting an algorithm or model to realize a technical goal. Your audience will primarily consist of search professionals, product owners, product managers, AI and relevance engineers, and other developers.
This year, we're looking for submissions across three core areas of interest. AI-powered search is a major theme, but we equally welcome work rooted in traditional search and relevance practice.
Search from a product perspective
- End-to-end case studies that elaborate on the business decisions that drove technology adoption
- Real world examples of how search evolves as a product in an AI-powered world
- Search (re-)platforming initiatives with their business drivers, architectural decisions and the lessons learned
AI-powered search as a technology
- Vector search, embeddings, LLMs, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- Lessons learned in building agentic retrieval systems
- Evaluation of search and AI quality
Search and relevance engineering
- Relevance tuning, ranking and learning-to-rank (LTR), query understanding, and business rule management
- Offline and online evaluation, behavioral signals
Talks at Haystack are 45 minutes long. Please include time for Q&A.
All speakers who are accepted will receive a 50% discount on the conference ticket either by discount code or via a refund (we try very hard to keep ticket prices as low as possible, plus we know some speakers pay for their ticket in advance in full anyway, so we feel this is an acceptable compromise).
Submissions will be reviewed by multiple reviewers. Reviewing will be conducted on a double-blind basis, with identifying information removed, by a volunteer group drawn from the search relevance community. The top-rated submissions will then be used to create the Haystack conference program.
Submissions close on 2026-07-12 23:59 (Europe/Berlin), 2 weeks, 6 days from now.