Agenda
Enterprise Search & Discovery is a featured event at KMWorld 2025. See the combined program!
- Monday Nov 17
- Tuesday Nov 18
- Wednesday Nov 19
- Thursday Nov 20
Optional Workshops/Conference Day
Sessions
Sessions
Sessions
9:00 AM
Optional Workshops/Conference Day
Length: 7 Hour 30 Minutes
Description: Enterprise Search & Discovery is part of KMWorld 2025 featuring five co-located events: KMWorld 2025, Taxonomy Boot Camp, Enterprise Search & Discovery, Text Analytics Forum, and Enterprise AI World. Upgrade to a Platinum Pass for your choice of two preconference workshops or access to Taxonomy Boot Camp on Monday. Workshops are also separately priced.
5:00 PM
Optional Workshops/Conference Day
Length: 1 Hour 30 Minutes
Description: Join us for the Enterprise Solutions Showcase Grand Opening reception. Explore the latest products and services from the top companies in the marketplace while enjoying drinks and light bites. Open to all conference attendees, speakers, and sponsors.
8:00 AM
8:30 AM
Keynotes
Length: 1 Hour
Speaker(s):
Martin Kon, President & COO, Cohere
Martin Kon, President & COO, Cohere
Description: Kon, a global leader in enterprise-grade language AI, explores how organizations can effectively harness the power of AI to transform KM, accelerate decision making, and unlock new levels of performance across sectors. From transforming financial institutions with productivity and efficiency gains to streamlining clinical workflows in healthcare and supporting secure, high-stakes applications in the public sector and national security, he highlights real-world use cases and lessons learned from the frontier of AI deployment. Kon shares insights into how enterprise-ready AI systems can be customized, governed, deployed, and scaled with confidence, helping to realize a world where technology commands language in a way that’s as compelling and coherent as we are. He shares his views of the landscape and frontier of AI progress with the goal of solving cutting-edge scientific problems, making research breakthroughs with continuous learning, empowering different perspectives that ensures responsible innovation, and building a body of knowledge for all.
9:30 AM
Keynotes
Length: 15 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Dorian Selz, CEO & Co-Founder, Squirro
Dorian Selz, CEO & Co-Founder, Squirro
Description: GenAI and intelligent agents are fundamentally transforming the landscape of enterprise operations by enabling unprecedented levels of automation, personalization, and efficiency. These technologies are breaking down traditional data silos, allowing for seamless integration and real-time access to information across various departments. In finance, for instance, GenAI is revolutionizing risk management and compliance by automating complex processes and providing actionable insights from vast datasets. Selz walks the audience through a step-by-step process of how to set up and guardrail the system to make it enterprise-ready. He focuses on lessons learned, pitfalls to avoid, and how success of such an initiative can look like.
9:45 AM
Keynotes
Length: 15 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Ashu Roy, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, eGain Corporation
Ashu Roy, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, eGain Corporation
Description: There is no question that GenAI has reignited interest in KM. Gartner predicts that 100% of GenAI virtual customer assistant and virtual agent assistant projects that lack integration to modern KM systems will fail to meet their CX and operational cost-reduction goals by 2025. As businesses experiment with GenAI, they are realizing that robust KM is foundational to its success. Roy discusses how KM and GenAI can accelerate and ensure mutual success, creating transformational business value at warp speed. He shares stunning success stories from clients. Get insights and ideas for your enterprise.
10:00 AM
Keynotes
Length: 15 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Tim Hill, Director, NiCE
Tim Hill, Director, NiCE
Description: Learn how leading organizations are revolutionizing their knowledge management with GenAI Workflow – and achieving measurable ROI. See how companies are leveraging GenAI and orchestrating the lifecycle of content creation through depreciation. Discover strategies that are transforming real world organization's approach to KM.
10:15 AM
Coffee & Networking Break in the Enterprise Solutions Showcase
Length: 45 Minutes
10:45 AM
Sessions
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Kari Mattek, Sr. Director of Workplace Portals, Northwestern Mutual
Eric Pugh, Co-Founder, OpenSource Connections
Kari Mattek, Sr. Director of Workplace Portals, Northwestern Mutual
Eric Pugh, Co-Founder, OpenSource Connections
Description: The challenges of measuring search success are long-standing. At Northwestern Mutual, a shift in qualitative metrics toward enhanced analytics capabilities enabled an assessment of search quality across a wide array of queries. This deeper qualitative understanding of user expectations led to identifying key areas for improvement and deploying an LLM as a judge. Two additional case studies about LLM as a judge showcase OpenSearch and Quepid.
11:45 AM
Sessions
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Danielle Henderson, Chief Knowledge Officer, IGM Financial
Danielle Henderson, Chief Knowledge Officer, IGM Financial
Description: IGM revolutionized its KM team by introducing insights engineers, who strategically utilized Coveo data to collaborate with content owners. This innovative approach closed content gaps and achieved an impressive 97% search relevancy across five platforms. Learn the strategies IGM employed and see how leveraging enterprise search analytics can drive smarter KM.
12:45 PM
Attendee Lunch in the Enterprise Solutions Showcase
Length: 1 Hour
1:45 PM
Sessions
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Shirley Zhang, Senior AI Engineer, Balyasny Asset Management
Aruna Govindaraju, Senior Solutions Architect, Amazon Open Search Service
Shirley Zhang, Senior AI Engineer, Balyasny Asset Management
Aruna Govindaraju, Senior Solutions Architect, Amazon Open Search Service
Description: Processing over 10 million documents daily, Balyasny’s deep research platform revolutionizes investment thesis creation through custom embedding models, strategic document chunking, and diversity-driven reranking algorithms. The core architecture enables seamless integration with AI agents, Excel compatibility, and systematic processing capabilities, while supporting a 200% year-over-year growth in data sources and user adoption. The presentation focuses on the technical implementation of a vector engine and the scalable cloud architecture that powers this enterprise-grade solution, offering attendees practical insights into building robust, AI-powered search applications for financial analytics.
2:45 PM
Sessions
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Jeff Fried, Director, InterSystems
Jeff Fried, Director, InterSystems
Description: RAG frameworks have revolutionized the integration of retrieval mechanisms with GenAI models, enabling more robust and contextually sophisticated applications. However, achieving reliable performance with RAG systems requires a nuanced, stepwise approach that addresses the pipeline’s technical, operational, and evaluation challenges. Fried shares the seven steps to RAG success, a practical methodology distilled from both academic best practices and real-world deployments. The proposed steps cover these critical aspects: domain-specific data curation, retrieval algorithm selection and tuning, embedding strategy optimization, prompt engineering, real-time evaluation, security considerations, and iterative feedback integration. By following these steps, practitioners can systematically enhance the accuracy, relevance, and trustworthiness of RAG-based solutions, paving the way for scalable and effective adoption in diverse industries.
3:30 PM
Coffee & Networking Break in the Enterprise Solutions Showcase
Length: 45 Minutes
4:15 PM
Sessions
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Anish Mathur, Director of Product Management, Elastic
Anish Mathur, Director of Product Management, Elastic
Description: AI agents have dominated the conversation over the last year, but developing knowledge-centric, enterprise agents requires highly effective search. Mathur explores the critical challenges and changing approaches to evaluating enterprise search performance as users shift to interacting through chat and workflows. He dives into new metrics and methodologies that combine traditional relevance with new concepts such as factual grounding, hallucination mitigation, task completion, and interpretability of agent interactions, sharing examples of approaches for task evaluation used internally at Elastic and how evaluation is being enabled for a wide variety of enterprise use cases today.
5:00 PM
8:00 AM
8:30 AM
Keynotes
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Seema Swamy, Senior Director, Research Insights, Data Analytics, & Data Science, Walmart
Seema Swamy, Senior Director, Research Insights, Data Analytics, & Data Science, Walmart
Description: Swamy sees a very good role for AI in optimization because there are so many tasks that humans cannot do as effectively. In tasks that are less about optimization and efficiency, Swamy is concerned about biases and transparency. AI is data and efficiency; humans are creative and innovative. Several research studies, including some by our speaker, have established that people respond to smart human–computer interfaces just as they would to another human being during an interpersonal interaction. AI agents should more easily pass the Turing test and be more vivid so human responses have greater valence, that is, their experiences will be significantly more positive or negative, depending on the context. The impact can be favorable or unfavorable from an experiential psychological perspective. Organizations need to ensure that the human experience with AI is favorable. Get insights and tips for ensuring this happens in your enterprise and with your clients. Understand the impact of AI on human experiences, especially as its implementation permeates all aspects of life, from retail shopping to psychotherapy. Swamy provides actionable insights to inform business and product strategy, drive innovation, and develop and implement data strategy, governance, and visualization, sharing real-world examples you can utilize in your organization.
9:15 AM
Keynotes
Length: 15 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Tony Grout, CPO, M-Files
Tony Grout, CPO, M-Files
Description: Technology applications are developing at a rapid-fire pace in today’s accelerated world. As organizations look toward the future of work, AI has emerged as a powerful tool to make jobs easier and enable better data-driven decisions. For knowledge workers especially, the goal has always been to reduce time spent on the essential but unstimulating tasks that distract from using key skills to generate value. For these workers, the future of work is knowledge work automation, to enhance collaboration with colleagues and automate workflows. Grout discusses new innovations like knowledge work automation to build a resilient workforce capable of responding to the most daunting of industry challenges, some time savings tips that occur as a result of adopting AI-supported digital transformation efforts like reduced errors, faster inquiry response time, and increased knowledge work output.
9:30 AM
Keynotes
Length: 15 Minutes
Speaker(s):
John Chmaj, Senior Director, Verint
John Chmaj, Senior Director, Verint
Description: In a world where speed is the key to great customer experience (CX), every interaction—whether human or automated—requires fast, flawless access to the right knowledge. As AI becomes prevalent across organizations, it is becoming critical to have the capability to deliver AI-driven knowledge across more solutions and their workflows to enable faster, more effective and efficient interactions. Our experienced and fun speaker looks at how AI can be deployed to push the boundaries of how and where knowledge can be surfaced and optimized for agents, copilots, and intelligent virtual assistants. Get a blueprint for deploying and harnessing the power of AI-driven KM to power measurable outcomes across a wide range of potential users, workflows, and scenarios.
9:45 AM
Keynotes
Length: 15 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Jeff Evernham, Chief Product Officer, Sinequa
Jeff Evernham, Chief Product Officer, Sinequa
Description: As enterprises race to implement agentic AI, many are unsure where to start; others see value quickly, but realize the path from prototype to real-world value is anything but simple and struggle to expand to more complex (and higher-value) applications. Speakers explore a real-world deployment of intelligent AI agents, highlighting what it takes to go beyond chatbots and pilot projects to deliver real business outcomes. Hear how one global organization successfully deployed AI agents to accelerate R&D, streamline compliance, and improve outcomes throughout the organization—first, by grounding the agents on their internal knowledge (with robust enterprise search); second, by applying proper governance using an industrial-strength agentic AI platform. Get key lessons learned, including how to ground agents in trusted enterprise content, what it takes to ensure secure and accurate responses, and how to avoid common pitfalls like siloed content and hallucinations.
10:00 AM
Coffee & Networking Break in the Enterprise Solutions Showcase
Length: 45 Minutes
10:45 AM
Sessions
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Rachel Miller, Product Manager, Reddit
Rachel Miller, Product Manager, Reddit
Description: In the race to build faster, smarter AI-powered search experiences, speed is a competitive advantage—but moving fast without guardrails can erode user trust and create long-term risk. This session explores how product and engineering teams can collaborate to deliver rapid innovation in enterprise search while maintaining responsible practices, transparency, and cross-functional alignment. Drawing from her experience scaling Reddit Search and leading responsible AI initiatives, Miller shares practical frameworks for high-velocity iteration that doesn’t compromise on integrity. Learn how to align on success metrics across teams, structure feedback loops to catch unintended harms early, and foster a shared culture of accountability between disciplines.
11:45 AM
Sessions
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Simon Denton, Enterprise Architect, Mott MacDonald
Simon Denton, Enterprise Architect, Mott MacDonald
Description: In the modern digital workplace, effective search is a necessity. Denton walks us through how to design and deliver a powerful, user-centric search experience in Microsoft 365 using real-world examples and practical insights drawn from hands-on experience. The components of Microsoft Search—such as Microsoft Graph, indexing, and connectors—work together to deliver intelligent results across Microsoft 365 apps. Crafting precise queries using the SharePoint Search Query Tool and leveraging the PnP Modern Search web parts let you build custom, dynamic search interfaces. Creating engaging display templates for people search and knowledge discovery uses JSON formatting to tailor the user experience. Finally, measuring the impact of your search solutions helps you continuously refine and improve the experience.
12:30 PM
Attendee Lunch in the Enterprise Solutions Showcase
Length: 1 Hour
1:30 PM
Sessions
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Zubair Talib, Executive Director, Celara
Zubair Talib, Executive Director, Celara
Description: While LLM-based chat agents have made significant progress, true natural voice agents remain a challenge. This session explores the current state of spoken dialogue AI, where it falls short, and what’s needed for truly natural, human-like AI conversations. Covered are advancements in speech synthesis, conversation dynamics, and emotional intelligence in voice AI and what is necessary to create intuitive, voice-first knowledge discovery experiences for enterprise users. Learn about the current state of voice AI, challenges in real-time conversational AI, and what’s next in this exciting search area.
2:30 PM
Sessions
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Michael Cizmar, CEO, MC+A
Michael Cizmar, CEO, MC+A
Description: What happens when you point GenAI at one of the most scrutinized archives in U.S. history? In this session, Michael Cizmar shares the story behind AI vs. the Archive—a public-facing experiment that applied document intelligence to the JFK Assassination files. Using modern AI tools, including LLMs and vector search, the project surfaced inconsistencies, connections, and overlooked insights buried in decades of unstructured government documents. Going beyond historical curiosity, it demonstrates how AI can transform how we interrogate complex archives—whether for legal discovery, compliance, or investigative journalism. Learn how to structure an AI pipeline for large-scale document analysis, the challenges of working with noisy and incomplete data, and how to balance transparency with automation.
3:15 PM
Coffee & Networking Break in Enterprise Solutions Showcase
Length: 45 Minutes
4:00 PM
Sessions
Length: 1 Hour
Speaker(s):
David Patrick, Subject Matter Expert, DSA Inc.
Eliane Bergmann, Knowledge Manager & Firm Taxonomist, RSM US LLP
Sara Brosam, Senior Director Enterprise Knowledge Management, RSM US LLP
David Patrick, Subject Matter Expert, DSA Inc.
Eliane Bergmann, Knowledge Manager & Firm Taxonomist, RSM US LLP
Sara Brosam, Senior Director Enterprise Knowledge Management, RSM US LLP
Description: Patrick notes that SharePoint in Microsoft 365 has both a classic and a modern search experience. Both search experiences use the same search index to find results, and you can’t enable or disable either search experience. He shows how to promote search results in the classic experience and how to create pages that allow you to combine search experiences. He reviews metadata use in search and explains the differences in managed metadata versus regular old choice columns and lookups. In the second talk, Bergmann and Brosam share how they have transformed the search experience in SharePoint across the enterprise by implementing a series of smart, user-focused strategies, such as introducing site URL prefixes to categorize site types, making it easier to tailor search verticals and scope, crafting meaningful bookmarks and acronyms using available tools and insights, and preparing content for AI. They ask if search is really broken, or if we aren’t being diligent enough in how we clean up and present our content. By identifying root causes and applying thoughtful solutions, they are moving toward a more intuitive and effective search experience for all users.
8:00 AM
8:30 AM
Keynotes
Length: 45 Minutes
Description: Innovation is the process of taking ideas from inception to impact. Organization leaders face continuous pressure to innovate, but no corporation, government agency, or non-profit has the resources, time or talent it needs to keep up with rapid advances in innovation, technology and global changes. Leaders know they need to look beyond their own enterprises to the external landscape and ecosystem to support internal innovation. Our speaker shares insights and practical examples from around the world as well as frameworks and models to work effectively in the innovation ecosystem. He provides tips on how to build structures and processes to support employee engagement as they learn and connect with other stakeholders.
9:15 AM
Keynotes
Length: 15 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Andreas Blumauer, SVP Growth, Graphwise
Andreas Blumauer, SVP Growth, Graphwise
Description: Building a powerful knowledge graph is no longer a choice between slow manual effort and untrusted automation. Our speaker shares real-world examples of how organizations are using an AI Flywheel to build and enhance trusted AI solutions that deliver measurable business value.
9:30 AM
Keynotes
Length: 15 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Brian Corcoran, KCS Certified Expert and Global Support Evangelist, SearchUnify
Brian Corcoran, KCS Certified Expert and Global Support Evangelist, SearchUnify
Description: Discover how Agentic AI is transforming enterprise search into a dynamic, autonomous knowledge ecosystem. This session explores how intelligent agents think, reason, and act to deliver real-time insights, streamline knowledge flow, and power smarter support experiences—redefining the role of search in today’s AI-driven, hyperconnected business landscape.
9:45 AM
Keynotes
Length: 15 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Philip Brittan, CEO, Bloomfire
Philip Brittan, CEO, Bloomfire
Description: Enterprise Intelligence is the next evolution of knowledge management—designed to connect, optimize, and activate knowledge where it matters most. In this keynote, Bloomfire CEO Philip Brittan shares how forward-thinking organizations are transforming static information into a dynamic, intelligent asset that fuels strategic decision making.
10:00 AM
10:15 AM
Sessions
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Cedric Ulmer, CEO, France Labs Datafari
Cedric Ulmer, CEO, France Labs Datafari
Description: Ulmer shares the latest lessons learned after implementing local AI models into the Datafari Enterprise Search solution for the City of Antibes. What difficulties were encountered, how were they solved, what was the setup, and how were results assessed? Covered is selected AI models and technical architecture, along with what is open source and what is not.
11:15 AM
Sessions
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Jaime Martin, Senior Product Manager/Business Analyst, Tax Analysis
Chris Marino, Senior Consultant, Enterprise Knowledge
Jaime Martin, Senior Product Manager/Business Analyst, Tax Analysis
Chris Marino, Senior Consultant, Enterprise Knowledge
Description: Tax Analysts is a nonpartisan, nonprofit publisher of news and commentary about federal, state, and international tax issues under the brand Tax Notes. In order to meet its subscribers’ needs in an increasingly competitive environment, it had to ensure its customers can easily and rapidly find the information they seek. This case study presents a comprehensive, innovative approach to improving search at scale. Tax Analysts strategic implementation incorporated multiple advanced search strategies to ensure subscribers not only found the information they were looking for but also discovered relevant information they previously never knew existed.
12:00 PM
Sessions
Length: 1 Hour
Speaker(s):
Parind Oza, Managing Director, Evalueserve
Parind Oza, Managing Director, Evalueserve
Title: Keynote: Activating Enterprise Intelligence in the Age of AI
Time: 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM
Description: As enterprise AI adoption surges, a startling paradox has emerged: While 70% of organizations are investing in AI and automation, only 18% say their KM strategy is ready to support it (Gartner 2024). An overreliance on technology without the processes or expertise to activate what enterprises already know is a challenge. Oza challenges the dominant "tool-first" narrative and reveals how forward-looking firms are building tailored, domain-driven KM ecosystems to fuel enterprise intelligence. Drawing on real-world transformations from top consulting and professional services firms, he shares how organizations are capturing what's in people’s heads before that information walks out the door, enabling decentralized, frontline decision making with embedded intelligence and scaling tacit knowledge into AI-ready assets through human-in-the-loop annotation and stewardship. Learn why LLMs and chatbots underperform without robust, contextual knowledge layers; how leading firms reduced content redundancy and enabled 20%–40% time savings across workflows; how annotation, sanitization, and human-in-the-loop curation drive model performance and user trust; discover strategies to capture primary knowledge in expert’s heads before it disappears and why internal influencers, not tech, make or break KM adoption and long-term ROI. See KM not as a backend content repository, but as the strategic core of how intelligence is produced, shared, and acted upon in modern enterprises.
Title: KMWorld Awards
Time: 1:30 PM - 1:45 PM
Description: KMWorld magazine is proud to sponsor the 2025 KMWorld awards, KM Promise & KM Reality, which are designed to celebrate the success stories of knowledge management. The awards will be presented along with Step Two’s Digital Awards, where you get a sneak peek behind the firewall of these organizations. Find out more—kmworld.com/Conference/2025/Awards.aspx.
1:00 PM
Sessions
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Ellen Ryan, Managing Partner, Docuvela
Ellen Ryan, Managing Partner, Docuvela
Description: AI can’t unlock insights from content it can’t find, understand, or trust. Yet many enterprises are racing to adopt AI tools without addressing the real blockers buried deep in their legacy systems and content infrastructure. Ryan explores three critical reasons your enterprise content may not be ready for AI—and what leading organizations are doing to fix them. Drawing from a real-world case study with a Fortune 100 life sciences company, she breaks down the tactical and strategic moves that transformed a maze of outdated repositories into a scalable, AI-ready content ecosystem.
2:00 PM
Sessions
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Heather Eisenbraun, Chief Knowledge Architect, Earley Information Science
Heather Eisenbraun, Chief Knowledge Architect, Earley Information Science
Description: Your enterprise PDFs are actively sabotaging your GenAI. Anyone who's tried to extract meaningful data from a complex PDF knows the frustration—what looks organized to a human becomes "document debris" when fed to a language model, rendering critical tables, labeled images, and technical diagrams incomprehensible. This session cuts through the common misconception that more sophisticated GenAI alone solves content ingestion, revealing why treating documents as formatted containers, not structured information sources, leads to "PDF purgatory." Gain practical, actionable strategies for transforming your most challenging content into purpose-driven components AI can genuinely understand. This isn't about better OCR; it's a fundamental paradigm shift in content preparation, empowering your GenAI initiatives to finally extract the intelligence your business needs.
3:00 PM
Sessions
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Marydee Ojala, Editor-in-Chief, KMWorld Magazine
Marydee Ojala, Editor-in-Chief, KMWorld Magazine
Description: What’s ahead for enterprise search and discovery? With a plethora of new developments, particularly the rise of agentic AI, this panel consults their crystal balls to predict the future, both long and short term. What prognostications will they make that will affect how you do your job and how your job could change? What role will AI play? Come and find out!
4:00 PM
Closing Keynotes
Length: 15 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Seth Earley, CEO & Founder, Earley Information Science
Seth Earley, CEO & Founder, Earley Information Science
Description: With all of the valuable insights from the conference, it can be challenging to identify where to begin and how to focus resources and attention. How do you bring key messages back to colleagues, teams, and leadership? A longtime KMer, Earley highlights ways to process and apply what you have learned and identify the best way to bring concepts to reality. He considers all the conference themes—search, discovery, taxonomy, information architecture, knowledge sharing, text processing—and how AI cuts across each of these. Get a simple framework for building a road map by discovering user needs, connecting findings to overarching themes, and then identifying the needed capabilities to address user needs, regardless of the tools, technologies, or approaches.
4:15 PM
Closing Keynotes
Length: 45 Minutes
Speaker(s):
Brian Pichman, Director, Strategic Innovation, Evolve Project
Ross Smith, WW Support Leader, Microsoft
Sandra Montanino, Founder & Principal, Navig8 PD
Kim Glover, Director, TechnipFMC
Brian Pichman, Director, Strategic Innovation, Evolve Project
Ross Smith, WW Support Leader, Microsoft
Sandra Montanino, Founder & Principal, Navig8 PD
Kim Glover, Director, TechnipFMC
Description: Where is KM going with all the AI developments for the enterprise? How are our organizations responding to the social structures and changes in our world? How are they innovating and exceeding customer expectations? Get inspiration from our practitioners and futurists and be ready for KM in 2026.
