How To Build Your First Agentic Search Application

Hosted by Doug Turnbull and Hugo Bowne-Anderson

Thu, Feb 19, 2026

11:00 PM UTC (30 minutes)

Virtual (Zoom)

Free to join

Invite your network

Go deeper with a course

Building AI Applications for Data Scientists and Software Engineers
Hugo Bowne-Anderson and Stefan Krawczyk
View syllabus

What you'll learn

Why agentic search matters

Why having an agent help a human search matters in many domains.

How to structure search and exploration

Best practices for structuring the agentic search loop

Hacking in-prompt reinforcement learning

Leveraging the agent’s deep need to please people to create more relevant search

Why this topic matters

Agentic search makes real what RAG started. Agents can be a research assistant, a helpful friend shopping with you, or a job coach. Agents complete the RAG transformation by going beyond one-shot retrieval, to reasoning + tool usage. They can explore & adjust course as needed, & remember your needs and preferences. You'll walk away with a framework & code to build your first agentic search app.

You'll learn from

Doug Turnbull

Led Search at Reddit and Shopify.

Doug helps Search teams deliver.


He led machine-learning-driven search at Reddit and Shopify, served as CTO of OpenSource Connections, and co-authored Relevant Search and AI Powered Search.


Doug coaches search experts at Apple, Meta, OpenAI, AirBNB and more, and has trained and advised teams at the Wikimedia Foundation, Wayfair, and AWS. He also created Quepid, SearchArray, and the Elasticsearch Learning to Rank plugin.



Hugo Bowne-Anderson

AI & data engineer, consultant, educator of 3+ million students (ex-Yale)

Hugo Bowne-Anderson is an independent data and AI consultant with extensive experience in the tech industry. He is the host of the industry Vanishing Gradients, where he explores cutting-edge developments in data science and artificial intelligence. As a data scientist, educator, evangelist, content marketer, and strategist, Hugo has worked with leading companies in the field. His past roles include Head of Developer Relations at Outerbounds, a company committed to building infrastructure for machine learning applications, and positions at Coiled and DataCamp, where he focused on scaling data science and online education respectively. Hugo's teaching experience spans from institutions like Yale University and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to conferences such as SciPy, PyCon, and ODSC. He has also worked with organizations like Data Carpentry to promote data literacy. His impact on data science education is significant, having developed over 30 courses on the DataCamp platform that have reached more than 3 million learners worldwide. Hugo also created and hosted the popular weekly data industry podcast DataFramed for two years. Committed to democratizing data skills and access to data science tools, Hugo advocates for open source software both for individuals and enterprises.

Sign up to join this lesson

By continuing, you agree to Maven's Terms and Privacy Policy.