Berlin Buzzwords 2026: retrieval moves to the center of the AI stack

Three days at the Kulturbrauerei, and one clear undercurrent: as agents take over, the quality of what we retrieve becomes the quality of what we do. Berlin Buzzwords is Europe’s leading conference for open-source search, data infrastructure and machine learning. Since 2010 it has gathered the engineers, researchers and maintainers behind much of the modern data stack — Lucene, Solr, OpenSearch, Kafka, Iceberg, Flink.