Incremental adoption of AI in E-commerce

Hosted by John Berryman and Doug Turnbull

Thu, Mar 26, 2026

5:15 PM UTC (1 hour)

Virtual (Zoom)

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Cheat at Search with Agents
Doug Turnbull
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What you'll learn

Practical AI Adoption for E-Commerce Teams

Offer a concrete and concise explanation of how you will help students understand and apply this lesson.

Adding AI Without Rewriting Your Stack

See how to introduce AI suggestions, query interpretation, and assistants while keeping your current search backend.

Demystifying RAG and Agentic AI

Learn how RAG and agents are really simple pipelines and loops around existing search APIs—not magic systems.

Why this topic matters

Most e-commerce teams lack the budget to hire specialized search or ML experts, leaving them stuck with mediocre keyword search. Modern AI can dramatically improve search relevance and customer experience—but only if adopted incrementally and pragmatically. This session shows how teams can evolve toward conversational commerce without risky rewrites or massive infrastructure changes.

You'll learn from

John Berryman

Arcturus Labs

John Berryman is the founder and principal consultant of Arcturus Labs, where he specializes in AI application development (Agency and RAG). As an early engineer on GitHub Copilot, John contributed to the development of its completions and chat functionalities, working at the forefront of AI-assisted coding tools. John is coauthor of Prompt Engineering for LLMs (O'Reilly). Before his work on Copilot, John's focus was search technology. His diverse experience includes helping to develop next-generation search system for the US Patent Office, building search and recommendations for Eventbrite, and contributing to GitHub's code search infrastructure. John is also coauthor of Relevant Search (Manning), a book that distills his expertise in the field. John feels fortunate to have worked at the intersection of cutting-edge AI applications and foundational search technologies, giving him the opportunity to contribute to innovation in both LLM applications and information retrieval.

Doug Turnbull

Search + Snuggie Enthusiast

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 overwhelming landscape first hand. Yet Doug still works 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?

We coach search professionals from

Reddit
GitHub
Apple
Amazon
Shopify.com

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