Program Overview
Reimagining Search: Another Ride on the Roller Coaster
Enterprise Search & Discovery 2026 offers attendees three days of practical advice, thought leadership, and interaction with colleagues and peers. Discover how to design, build, and manage better search and discovery to help extract critical knowledge and business value from your organizational data.
Every time we think innovations in search and discovery have slowed down, allowing us to catch our breath and incorporate new technology, expectations, and modernizations into our daily workflows, it changes. It’s a roller coaster of AI-driven, agentic discoveries, with the nagging feeling that there’s more to search than AI. We barely have time to think about the latest possibilities for reimagining search as the roller coaster completes its climb and plummets downward, combining exhilaration and fear for the riders. At the same time, the core value of search and knowledge discovery remains. It’s still about relevance, accuracy, and speed. Recall and precision have not disappeared. The people aspects of the search process still clamor for attention. At Enterprise Search & Discovery, we consider every aspect of reimaging search, from the tried and tested to the new and bleeding edge.
We’ve been here before, reimagining search as times and technologies change. Yet somehow this time it feels different. We’ve moved from lexical search to semantic search, from simple embeddings to complex reasoning agents, from search engineering to prompt engineering to context engineering, from search engines to insight engines to answer engines. We’ve implemented RAG to combat hallucinations, We’ve become familiar with knowledge graphs, personalization, generative answering, semantic layers, intelligent chatbots, NLP, machine learning, and multimodal LLMs. We’ve investigated best practices for training LLMs to deliver relevant and reliable search results. We’ve discarded results lists in favor of actual answers.
Enterprise search requires the judicious use of various technologies, not all of which are grounded in AI, but many are. Yes, AI now dominates enterprise search, but it hasn’t replaced the fundamentals. We need to channel the tantalizing potential of technology, that rush we feel from a roller coaster ride, with the pragmatic needs of employees and customers. Aligning technology with user needs and behaviors is an ongoing challenge. Designing enterprise search to accommodate multiple input and output formats is essential. Considerations around data governance, security concerns, connecting disparate data sources, and knowledge architecture aren’t necessarily solved with AI. It can help, but human intervention is usually required.
Check back in mid-July for full program details!
