Announcing Bistro Innovation Labs

After two decades in search and information retrieval — most recently as Solutions Architect at Qdrant and Search Relevance Consultant at OpenSource Connections — I’m going full-time on Bistro Innovation Labs.

Why now

The last two years have been the most exciting stretch of my career. Vector search went mainstream. RAG went from novelty to default architecture. And I got to work with teams shipping real production systems on top of all of it.

But I kept seeing the same pattern: teams have models, they have vectors, they have prompts — they don’t have evaluation. Every improvement is a coin flip. Every regression is invisible until users complain.

Bistro Innovation Labs exists to fix that.

What we do

We work with a small number of teams each quarter on:

• AI readiness assessments — where you are, what to build first, what to ignore.
• Search and RAG engineering — hands-on relevance work with proper evaluation.
• Vector search adoption — hybrid retrieval done right; when embeddings help and when they don’t.
• AI strategy — model selection, build-vs-buy, roadmaps grounded in evidence.

Michelin thinking. Bistro delivery.

We bring the rigor and the standards of a top-tier engineering shop — and deliver like a bistro: fast, warm, focused on what the customer actually wants. Problem-first. Value-obsessed.

If you have a hard search or retrieval problem, get in touch.