Berlin Buzzwords 2026

Lester Solbakken

Lester Solbakken is a Founding Engineer at HORNET.dev, where he builds production-grade retrieval infrastructure for AI agents. Previously pursued a PhD within Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, with research centered on neural networks, exploratory data analysis and self-organizing systems. He speaks about building reliable, high-performance AI systems that bridge research and real-world deployment.


Session

06-09
11:10
40min
When better retrieval makes agents worse
Lester Solbakken

Agentic systems can break not because information is missing, but because persuasively wrong context gets promoted into action. We examine a recurring pattern: retrieval metrics improve while agent behavior degrades as distractors enter multi-step loops. We show why relevance, reliability, and security are tightly connected in agentic retrieval.

Kesselhaus