You're solving the wrong problem with AI Search

Part of The Frontier of AI Search

Hosted by Atita Arora, Trey Grainger, and Doug Turnbull

Fri, Jun 26, 2026

4:00 PM UTC (1 hour)

Virtual (Zoom)

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AI-Powered Search: Modern Retrieval for Humans & Agents
Trey Grainger and Doug Turnbull
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What you'll learn

Misunderstood failure patterns holding back your AI search

Most search failures are misdiagnosed. Learn to name what you're experiencing before you reach for the wrong solution.

Decades of wisdom from the front-lines of top search teams

Lessons learned across diverse clients of companies like at Qdrant, Voyager Search, Lucidworks, OpenSource Connections.

10 patterns. Every search system fits one.

A diagnostic map across ecommerce, media, legal, finance, geospatial and more, with the signature failure mode for each.

Agentic retrieval inherits your broken archetype

It's not a new problem. It's your existing problem, now with an agent on top.

Why this topic matters

Many teams waste time implementing AI Search solutions that solve the wrong problem. They keep rebuilding relevance when they have a catalog problem. They add vector search when there's a schema problem. They tune ranking, but have no signal. Every search failure belongs to a recognizable pattern, and this session gives you the diagnostic layer top search consultants learn, but most teams skip.

You'll learn from

Atita Arora

Search & AI Strategist - formerly Voyager Search, Qdrant, OSC, Lucidworks

Atita Arora is an AI Search Expert with nearly 2 decades of hands-on engagements across ecommerce, health, media, finance, legal, enterprise, geospatial, and government platforms. She has held senior search and AI roles at Voyager Search, Qdrant, and OpenSource Connections, and runs an independent AI advisory and solution consulting practice.

Trey Grainger

Author, AI-Powered Search; Founder @ Searchkernel

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.

Doug Turnbull

Co-author, AI-Powered Search

In 2012, Doug got bit by the search bug and he's still trying to keep up. From full-text search, to Learning to Rank models, to search agents that generate their own code, he knows the endless landscape first hand. Yet Doug wants to deeply understand the what / how / why, and help teams use these technologies practically, distinguishing hype from reality.

He’s led search at Reddit, Shopify, and Wikipedia, authored Relevant Search and AI Powered Search, and advised 100+ organizations over the years - all in pursuit of the same question: how does search actually work?

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