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.

Piotr Kobziakowski is an AI Search Engineer specializing in search, analytics. He has designed and optimized large‑scale search and recommendation systems for high‑traffic platforms. He is working extensively with modern search stack Vespa and previously Elasticsearch. His experience spans across relevance modeling, ranking, experimentation, data analytics and data‑driven product improvements, merging engineering and business goals.

As an instructor, Piotr focuses on making search, AI, and personalization practical and accessible.

Philippe pioneered the concept of the Social Graph while attending Harvard with Mark Zuckerberg. He has since gone on to achieve significant contributions in the fields of data science and machine learning. Recently, he was VP of Data Science and Machine Learning and responsible for search at Gorillas, the quick-commerce company that pioneered grocery delivery within the hour. He is now the technical founder at Vectra, an AI company creating the foundation model for e-commerce search.