Building Search for AI Agents with Exa CEO Will Bryk

About this episode

Sarah Wang speaks with Exa CEO Will Bryk about building search infrastructure for AI agents and the implications for the future of information discovery.

Sarah Wang speaks with Exa cofounder and CEO Will Bryk about building search infrastructure for the AI era. The conversation covers Exa’s origins, why traditional search engines were not designed for AI agents, and how search changes when the user is no longer a human but an autonomous system. They discuss retrieval, agent workflows, coding agents, data access, and why search may become a foundational layer for the emerging agent economy. Along the way, Bryk shares his views on AI-native products, the future of information discovery, and why some of the most important problems in technology can ultimately be framed as search problems.

People in this episode

Host: Sarah Wang

Guest: Will Bryk

Topics covered

• AI agents
• search infrastructure
• information discovery
• autonomous systems
• agent economy

Keywords

• AI
• search engines
• Exa
• agent workflows
• data access
• AI-native products
• technology problems

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Exa

More episodes of AI + a16z

• AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data · June 2, 2026 · 51 min
• Ben Horowitz on AI Infrastructure, Economics and The New Laws of Software · May 19, 2026 · 30 min
• AI Infrastructure, Distribution, and the Next Wave of Software · May 12, 2026 · 39 min
• From Vector Databases to Knowledge Engines: The Next Layer of AI · May 5, 2026 · 46 min
• Why We Need Continual Learning · April 28, 2026 · 19 min
• The Agent Era: Building Software Beyond Chat with Box CEO Aaron Levie · April 21, 2026 · 60 min