Adam led efforts for AI and search at Aerospike, covering research and development of vector search and graph database offerings. Today he's focused on accelerating the pace of software development by founding Hevmind — a model-first consulting practice and search R&D lab where he helps teams wrangle search infra, write effective evals, and design for agents.

Doug Turnbull has been enthusiastic about search and retrieval since 2013. He co-authored Relevant Search and AI Powered Search. He created open source tools such as Quepid, Elasticsearch Learning to Rank plugin, and SearchArray.

Doug recently worked for Daydream. His hybrid search solutions using CLIP models led to a doubling in conversions (purchase in saves) in Daydream's e-commerce AI search. Doug's recent work on ML ranking at Reddit created a 2% increase in DAU, the largest seen in Reddit search history. Recently Doug worked at Shopify to help improve merchant search attributed revenue by 10% year over year.. Doug spent 8 years consulting at dozens of organizations during his time as CTO at OpenSource Connections.

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