ElasticON Sydney 2025: Deriving value from your data with Search AI – Partner Content

The event was the latest leg in a global tour to showcase how organisations can get ahead of two disruptive forces: rampant data growth and the seemingly infinite potential of artificial intelligence. By using Search AI, they can maximise efficiency, drive innovation, elevate customer experiences, improve operational resilience, and mitigate security risk.

During the opening remarks, Jeremy Pell, Elastic AVP, highlighted how deeply Elastic’s technology affects Australians’ daily lives – from booking rideshares and hotels to securing platforms against cyber threats.

“I’ve been blown away by how often our Search AI technology touches the lives of Australians every single day,” Pell noted, sharing examples from his own week using services powered by Elastic.

With Elastic celebrating its 13th anniversary, the company’s Chief Product Officer, Ken Exner, emphasised that while generative AI is transformational, it doesn’t require extensive resources to implement effectively.

 “What you need to put generative AI to work – vector search, retrieval, augmented generation, prompt engineering – what we call Search AI – are very accessible,” said Exner.

This message resonated with attendees, many of whom were concerned about getting started with AI implementation without teams of ML scientists or expensive GPU infrastructure.

Where Technology Drives Business Value

The conference focused on Elastic’s technical advancements, particularly those making AI implementation more accessible.

Bahaaldine Azarmi, VP for Global Customer Engineering, demonstrated one of Elastic’s key solutions in this area: AI Playground. The accessibility of AI Playground comes from providing users with a graphical environment that allows them to experiment with different large language models and techniques and even generates application code to speed initial development of AI applications using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG).

Another key innovation that Elastic was keen to demonstrate was the ‘semantic text’ field type, which enables semantic search with a simple configuration change. The system handles complex operations like chunking strategies, inference models, and vector database management, but that is kept out of sight and users need not understand these complexities to leverage the technology.

“We’re making it easy for customers to use our technology and have a simple experience–whether that’s a ready-made solution or access to the deeper technology,” Exner said, summarising Elastic’s approach to product design. “We give our customers great foundational primitives, best in class capabilities, but then layer on abstractions that make our solutions for search, security and observability easier to use and more approachable.”

Azarmi and Exner also showcased Better Binary Quantisation (BBQ), which delivers 95% improvement in memory utilisation without significantly compromising accuracy – critical for cost-effective vector search and RAG implementation for enterprise AI.

Elastic’s new Search AI Lake architecture was another core focus throughout the workshops and presentations of the day, addressing a fundamental industry challenge: how to efficiently store and analyse growing volumes of data while maintaining performance.

“A typical modern Kubernetes application typically generates about 50 gigabytes of data daily, just for things like logs and metrics. Companies have to deal with all this data and with more regulatory requirements for retaining it. Additionally, now with generative AI, data has new value,” Exner said.

The Search AI Lake represents a massive re-architecture of Elasticsearch, creating a stateless system that separates compute and storage. This provides an infinitely scalable system with long-term, durable, and cost-effective storage without compromising query performance – a combination previously impossible with traditional data lakes or lake houses.

The company also introduced specific optimisations like LogsDB, which delivers up to 70% improvement in storage efficiency for log data through new compression algorithms, indexing, and “synthetic source” capabilities.

How Organisations Across Sectors Are Working With Elastic

ElasticON also featured several customer presentations highlighting real-world applications of Elastic’s technology.

Richard Heeley, Head of Technology at Macquarie’s Banking and Financial Services group, shared how the bank has been able to transform its approach to transaction data, transforming mundane statement entries into personalised customer experiences that incorporate geo-location, transaction categorisation and user customisation options.

“We’ve tried to transform the humble transaction, like a $4 cup of coffee that appears on your statement, into something that is more engaging, more useful, and more personalised,” Heeley said. “Being able to provide that all comes down to search at the end of the day. We’re using modern search techniques across these different portals to offer the best experiences we can to our customers, so they can stay on top of their finances all from the palm of their hand.”

David Tsai, Senior SEO Lead at Spark New Zealand, demonstrated how the telecommunications company overcame a decade of search challenges to likewise deliver exceptional customer experiences. Their team achieved remarkable improvements by implementing Elastic’s technology – reducing “no search results” instances from 30% to just 1.3%, and increasing click-through rates from 10.3% to 30%.

“We went from chaos to clarity, laying the groundwork to establish foundational intelligence search and how we are going to build a smarter, more searchable experience for our customers,” Tsai said.

Strengthening Security

The conference also highlighted how Elastic is transforming security and observability with AI. Attack Discovery attracted particular attention as a feature that uses AI to analyse alerts, identify false positives, and map attack paths automatically, helping security analysts overcome alert fatigue.

“Generative AI can allow you to start getting ahead of the adversary again and start closing the gaps on some of these challenges,” explained Matt Ramsey, Principal Security Specialist at Elastic. ‘One of the biggest misconceptions about AI is that it’s a job killer. “AI is going to take my job away.” That’s not the case. AI is an enabler for your security practitioners.’

The AI Assistant demonstrated during the keynote similarly impressed attendees. When investigating application errors, it automatically searches through logs, metrics, and external sources like GitHub issues, providing comprehensive context without requiring extensive expertise.

Partnering and Collaboration in a World of Open Source

The event culminated in the Partner Awards evening, celebrating the growing strength of Elastic’s channel and partner collaborations in the ANZ region over the past year.

Andrew Habgood, Vice President of Channels & Alliances for Asia-Pacific and Japan at Elastic, highlighted the importance of the company’s partner ecosystem in enhancing AI accessibility for businesses of all sizes. He stated, “Our collaboration with technology providers, systems integrators, and industry leaders is driving innovation and making AI more accessible to companies of all sizes. The Elastic Partner Awards are a testament to these strong partnerships, recognising the outstanding contributions of our ecosystem in shaping a dynamic AI landscape that fuels growth, accelerates transformation, and creates new opportunities across the region.”

The 2025 Elastic Partner Awards recognised outstanding contributions across ANZ, with Recon Technologies taking Partner of the Year, NQRY winning the Innovation Award, and AWS Australia honoured as Cloud Partner of the Year. Other recipients included ctrl:cyber for Managed Services Partner, Atturra for Reseller of the Year, Skillfield for Services Partner, and Deloitte named Systems Integrator of the Year.

Ian Oppermann, Co-Founder of ServiceGen, said on the panel during the awards event that AI’s strength – particularly as Elastic and its partners envision it – lies in how it makes data and information more accessible.

“I’ve spent decades with a philosophical perspective that data is a way to see the world, and AI is a way of understanding the world,” Oppermann said. “When you take people through just how much data they’ve got in their organisation, it really is quite amazing to see people light up.”

As businesses continue navigating the AI landscape, ElasticON Sydney demonstrated that the right platform makes AI accessible to all, and truly democratises the ability to transform operations, enhance customer experiences, and drive innovation.