# Ryan Ahern — AI Engineer Sydney 2026

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Canonical page: https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/speakers/ryan-ahern/
Program status: The working timetable is public. Announced speakers and presentations are confirmed; some track assignments, session groupings and times may change as keynote, partner and specialist sessions are finalised. Morning keynote programmes and Industry sessions will be added as they are confirmed.

## Less is More: Optimising Search for Agents

- When: 2026-12-07 14:10 (Australia/Sydney)
- Track: AI Engineering

Giving agents more search results doesn't necessarily make them better.

Ryan Ahern explains how Exa is rethinking search for agents, improving task success rates while reducing the cost of finding the information they need.

## Ryan Ahern

Forward Deployed Engineer, Exa

Ryan Ahern is a forward deployed engineer at Exa, the search engine built for AI. His open-source work focuses on making web search useful and configurable for AI agents, including Exa's integration in Pydantic AI, where he added direct control of search filters and made highlights the default so agents get the context they need with fewer tokens.

## Conference

- [Conference overview](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/index.md)
- [Agent guide](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/for-agents/)
- [llms.txt](https://webdirections.org/ai-engineer/llms.txt)