Michael Schechter is Corporate Vice President of Search Growth and Experiences at Microsoft, where he has spent over two decades shaping how people discover information on the web. A computer science graduate of the University of Maryland, he has been at the center of Bing's evolution - from leading the captions feature in its early days to orchestrating the AI-powered transformation of Bing with Copilot Search. Known for his candid voice on search industry trends and his willingness to engage publicly on topics like citation transparency and AI reliability, Schechter represents the rare executive who can speak both engineer and user fluently.
Will Bryk is the co-founder and CEO of Exa, a neural search engine built for the AI era. A Harvard CS and physics graduate who interned at SpaceX and engineered AI products at Cresta, Bryk left to answer a question that gnawed at him: what if Google was already obsolete? Exa reimagines search using transformer-based link prediction - what Bryk calls 'neural PageRank on steroids' - to help AI agents find exactly the right information rather than keyword-stuffed SEO noise. The company raised $85M in a Benchmark-led Series B at a $700M valuation in September 2025, with Nvidia and Lightspeed also backing the bet that AI systems will soon generate more search queries than humans.