Search (Re)platforming for Humans and AI

If your team is struggling to balance business rule demands, modern vector workflows, and AI-powered evaluation, you are not alone. Across the search industry, production systems are being forced to evolve into multi-consumer environments serving human and agentic searchers. At the same time teams are confronted with legacy systems and shifting organizational dynamics. In our consulting work at OpenSource Connections, we see firsthand what search teams are wrestling with as they are tasked with building AI-ready retrieval systems. This presentation shares grounded insights directly from client engagements:

• How engineering teams are executing search replatforming for AI and how that interacts with their organizational structure and processes.

• How a new demographic of builders views search as an API-driven building block for autonomous tools.

• Why deterministic query governance remains vital alongside probabilistic models to provide tuning knobs to the business and have a certain degree of control over a non-deterministic system.

We will also examine why Generative AI has made search evaluation significantly more challenging, despite LLMs as judges becoming a staple for scaling quality assessment and explore how these observations impact us as a community.

Daniel Wrigley

OpenSource Connections

Daniel has worked in search since graduating in computational linguistics studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich in 2012 where he developed his weakness for search and natural language processing. His experience as a search consultant paved the way for becoming an O’Reilly author co-authoring the first German book on Apache Solr. His current work focuses on leveraging AI agents to accelerate the next generation of search quality improvements. In his free time he supports the local fire brigade as a volunteer firefighter and serves as the sports director of the local shooting club in the village he lives in.

René Kriegler

OpenSource Connections

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.