Conference Presentation, Product Demonstration, Keynote
Perfect Search, Built for AI Agents | Will Bryk, Exa | RAISE Summit 2026
- Market Shift Trajectory: AI agents are projected to surpass human web searches by the end of the current year, with a long-term forecast predicting agents will conduct 1,000 times more searches than humans within a few years.
- Current Scale: Exa currently serves 5,000 companies and 400,000 developers, providing search infrastructure for coding agents (e.g., Cursor, Cognition), go-to-market agents (e.g., HubSpot), and financial intelligence agents (e.g., hedge funds, banks).
- Core Mission: The company aims to solve "misinformed anarchy" by transitioning from keyword-based recommendation engines (e.g., Google) to "perfect search" that provides comprehensive, unbiased data to enable informed individual and societal decision-making.
- Human vs. AI Query Dynamics: Human searches are characterized by simple, slow keyword inputs, whereas AI agents execute complex, high-speed queries requiring precise, structured answers rather than link lists.
- Retrieval Technology: Exa utilizes deep learning embeddings and novel retrieval techniques invented since 2021, moving beyond traditional keyword matching to understand semantic meaning (e.g., "shirts without stripes").
- Performance Metrics: The platform offers two distinct modes: a high-quality mode taking 10–60 seconds for complex data aggregation, and a sub-200-millisecond mode for real-time AI applications like voice agents.
- Token Efficiency: Exa reduces downstream LLM costs by extracting only the "juiciest" 100 tokens per document instead of transmitting full 10,000-token pages, directly addressing AI inference cost concerns.
- Structural Output: The system supports structured data extraction (e.g., listing engineers with specific college backgrounds and tenure) to facilitate automated decision-making in recruiting and finance.
- ExaConnect Marketplace: A new initiative allows data providers to monetize previously non-public datasets (e.g., SimilarWeb traffic, Crunchbase, satellite data, shipping logs), enabling agents to query proprietary data in a free-market environment.
- Accuracy Goals: Partnerships with data providers aim to push AI agent decision accuracy from 99.9% to 99.9999%, which the company cites as critical for high-stakes financial investments.
- Strategic Timeline: Exa plans to achieve "perfect search" in under five years, with development velocity accelerating to match the output of the entire previous five-year period every two quarters.
- Societal Impact Vision: The company targets the 2028 U.S. presidential election as a key milestone, intending to equip billions of people with near-perfect information to improve democratic decision-making and solve societal coordination problems.