Berlin Buzzwords 2026 - Trey Grainger & Doug Turnbull, Role of Search in modern AI and new course

This episode was recorded LIVE at the Berlin Buzzwords 2026

YouTube version: https://youtu.be/acOGVynTVpM

The cameraman is pure Zoom's AI ;)

The Course: "AI-Powered Search: Modern Retrieval for Humans & Agents"

aipoweredsearch.com/live-course?promoCode=vector-podcast

Discount Code for course (20% off): "vector-podcast"

AI-Powered Search (Book, Content, Community): https://aipoweredsearch.com/

Timecodes

00:00 Intro

00:30 Doug's and Trey's impression of the conference

01:16 How modern AI changed search (if any)

05:48 How to bring AI techniques into existing search engines on a budget

10:44 What the AI-Powered Search course includes

18:02 Staying hands-on

18:47 Guest's favourite topic that keeps them up at night

27:40 Message to the builders of search tech

32:55 Search continues to be challenging and exciting

Shownotes:

- Upcoming course in detail (grab promo code above to save 20%): https://aipoweredsearch.com/articles/the-frontier-of-ai-search-ai-powered-search-modern-retrieval-for-humans-agents/

- Doug's blog on search, agents, RAG, LLM as a judge and more: https://softwaredoug.com/

- AI-Powered Search: https://aipoweredsearch.com/

- Berlin Buzzwords:

- MICES: https://mices.co/

- Future of Search conference: https://berlinsearchweek.com/future-of-search/

- Women of Search: https://www.women-of-search.org/

- "AI is here - time to throw away our search engines?" panel hosted by Charlie Hull at Berlin Buzzwords 2026: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StaPk0k-52Y

- Dmitry's prototype of Wormhole vectors idea with OpenSearch: https://aiven.io/blog/beyond-hybrid-search-traversing-vector-spaces-with-wormhole-vectors

- Dmitry's blog on Medium: https://dmitry-kan.medium.com/

- Dmitry's Tech Stories on Substack: https://substack.com/@dmitrykan

- Follow me on LinkedIn for Search updates: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitrykan/