2026-06-08 –, Kesselhaus
Why do we even need traditional search when AI can do everything? Or is it foolish to ignore simple, proven techniques for delivering great results? What's the best way to combine old and new? Join our panel of experts for a fun and provocative debate!
AI has revolutionised the world of search – first by giving us better ways to understand language, rewrite content and provide single answers, and latterly with augmented coding techniques & AI agents to configure our engines & run our searches for us.
If you're working on search applications today you're probably looking at AI techniques first - but there's decades of work behind the traditional search techniques that you can't afford to ignore. Our panel, which includes leading experts on both old-school and new search techniques, will help you decide how to combine the best of both worlds.
I'm The Search Juggler, an expert search consultant who has been helping companies large and small build scalable, performant and accurate search applications for over 25 years. My clients have included governments, global e-commerce giants, law firms and startups. I co-host the London Search & AI Meetup and ran the Haystack conference series for 5 years. I'm an OpenSearch Ambassador, and a Vespa.ai Partner - but I work with many different search engines.
Atita Arora is an open-source contributor and PMC at Apache OpenNLP, with a long-standing career dedicated to advancing search, information retrieval systems, and AI. She focuses on advancing search technologies that connect research to meaningful, real-world applications. A regular speaker at international conferences, she also co-leads Women in Search, advocating for diversity and inclusion across the tech community. Atita is an independent AI and Search consultant, advancing practical innovation in modern search systems, driven by the belief that innovation delivers its greatest value when shared and applied.
Jo Kristian Bergum is the CEO of HORNET.dev and a 25-year veteran of the search industry, formerly serving as the Chief Scientist at Vespa.ai and a Distinguished Engineer at Yahoo.
Dmitry is currently in charge of managed OpenSearch product business at Aiven, where he leads both product and engineering supporting clients around the world. He previously served as Senior Product Manager at TomTom, Principal AI Scientist at Silo AI / AMD, and Head of Search at AlphaSense.
He is the founder and host of the Vector Podcast.
Contributor to open source (Quepid, Luke), and member of the OpenSearch Search Technical Advisory Group (TAG). Applied and extended Apache Solr and Apache Lucene for 10 years and worked with Elasticsearch and OpenSearch for over 6 years. Dmitry believes in the power of live discussion with every practitioner that drives a wider understanding of where we are moving as the search community.
Developer Advocate at Qdrant with 8 years of IT experience across software engineering, machine learning, and developer advocacy.
Holds a Technical University of Munich master's degree in Data Analytics and Engineering.
Passionate about NLP and Information Retrieval.
Believes in conference-, complaints- and memes-driven development:)