By Guest: Bianca Lewis (LinkedIn)
Company: OpenSearch Software Foundation
Show Name: An Eye on AI
Topics: Agentic AI, Observability
OpenSearch has moved far beyond its original origins. At KubeCon in Atlanta, the momentum around the project was impossible to miss — new members, new capabilities, and a rapidly expanding community that is pushing the platform into areas that didn’t exist when it was first contributed to the Linux Foundation. In this conversation with Bianca Lewis, Executive Director of the OpenSearch Software Foundation, we dive into how the project is evolving, why vendor neutrality matters more than ever, and how AI is influencing everything from search to Observability.
For a project that started as an effort to keep search open and transparent, OpenSearch is now positioning itself as a critical part of the modern data and AI infrastructure stack. And as Lewis puts it, the community has entered a “wave of innovation” that’s accelerating every part of its roadmap.
What follows is a deeper look at the themes we discussed on camera, built around the foundation’s mission, its growth, and the emerging technical capabilities that will shape its direction in 2025 and beyond.
Building a Truly Vendor-Neutral Home for OpenSearch
When Lewis joined the foundation two months ago, she stepped into a project that has seen significant transformation. The first year after OpenSearch was contributed to the Linux Foundation was focused almost entirely on establishing vendor neutrality. While AWS played a central role in the project’s origins, the foundation needed to create a space where companies could trust that the software would always remain open, collaborative, and community-driven.
This shift has paid off. Contributors are arriving from far beyond the early stakeholders, and the number of organizations adopting and building on OpenSearch has expanded significantly. Lewis emphasizes that vendor neutrality isn’t just a governance model; it’s the backbone of long-term trust. Teams want to know that the features they rely on won’t suddenly be paywalled or pushed behind closed licenses.
That credibility is now attracting major enterprises. SAP and Uber recently joined the foundation, and at KubeCon, Lewis announced a new premier member: IBM. Each of these members sees OpenSearch not simply as a search engine, but as a core data platform for AI-driven workloads. Their involvement brings financial support, engineering resources, and real-world use cases that push the project forward.
Elevating the Community Into a Strategic Force
One of Lewis’s strongest points during our conversation was that OpenSearch is no longer defined only by its code contributors. She highlighted the need to build what she calls the “organized community” — a transparent structure that recognizes the wide range of people who participate in the ecosystem.
In her view, open source thrives when every type of contributor sees value. Developers may write code, but others maintain documentation, build SBOM libraries, improve compliance tooling, or help shape governance. As regulations like the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) in Europe come into effect, companies will rely even more on open projects that help them understand and manage compliance.
Lewis wants the foundation to give community members a larger voice in shaping the roadmap, influencing new features, and helping to scale education and certification programs. This is especially important as more vendors join the ecosystem. A strong, transparent community structure helps create a self-reinforcing cycle — users attract vendors, vendors provide services, and services make it easier for new users to adopt OpenSearch.
“We want people not only contributing code but gaining value from the non-code assets too,” she explained. Upskilling, certifications, and an ecosystem of accredited vendors are part of the long-term plan.
The Role of AI: From Buzz to Practical Value
Discussing AI is unavoidable in today’s technology landscape. But Lewis was candid about the gap between the hype and the real-world use cases. For OpenSearch, AI becomes powerful when the platform gives context to data. Instead of looking at logs, metrics, and traces in separate silos — troubleshooting each incident manually — OpenSearch uses a unified data model that lets AI correlate events.
This is a fundamental shift from the earlier generation of machine-learning tools that simply flagged anomalies. Context makes AI useful. When CPU spikes occur, the system can map them back to the metrics, logs, and traces that belong to the same event. Instead of working backward, teams get closer to an instant understanding of the root cause.
Another breakthrough in the 3.x family is agentic search. In this release, users can ask questions in plain English and let OpenSearch formulate the query, syntax, and all underlying operations. This lowers the barrier for non-technical stakeholders — executives, analysts, and product teams — who want insights without learning search languages.
Lewis describes this feature as a “human aspect” of OpenSearch’s evolution. It brings people who traditionally sat outside of engineering into the decision-making loop, making search more accessible and more collaborative.
Why AI + Search Matters for Modern Enterprises
AI-driven search is rapidly changing how organizations think about data retrieval. OpenSearch’s strength lies in combining multiple types of search — keyword, semantic, vector, and hybrid approaches — into a single engine. This versatility makes it ideal for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), a core pattern used in enterprise AI systems today.
Lewis believes that OpenSearch’s strong foundation in keyword and semantic search gives it an advantage over vector-only systems, which often struggle with large-scale enterprise workloads. With hybrid search, OpenSearch can more accurately filter, rank, and contextualize results, especially across multi-petabyte deployments.
The 3.x release also brings GPU support, improved scalability, and a redesigned discovery interface, turning OpenSearch into a foundation for data retrieval rather than just a convenient search box.
OpenSearch as a Platform: Observability, Search, and Beyond
Lewis has been involved in search technologies since 2015, and she sees OpenSearch emerging as a platform rather than a product. Observability is one of the biggest focus areas. As she shared, one of the most common pain points for organizations is the delay between identifying an anomaly and uncovering its root cause.
By correlating logs, traces, and metrics in one interface and cross-referencing them with AI, OpenSearch creates a more seamless path to understanding incidents. And by moving away from isolated data silos, enterprises gain a clearer, real-time view of their systems.
Whether it’s enterprise search or large-scale Observability, the combination of an open data platform + AI context layer is what sets OpenSearch apart. As Lewis notes, it’s becoming central to how businesses operate — no longer a “necessary evil” but a source of operational certainty.
Priorities for 2026: Growth, Sustainability, and Community Strength
Lewis outlined three intersecting priorities for the year ahead: community, project governance, and technical vision.
- Strengthen the organized community
The foundation wants full visibility into how many organizations are using OpenSearch and where. Clearer insight helps vendors understand market needs and helps the project track adoption. - Expand member participation
More members bring more influence, more governance participation, and more engineering resources. Special Interest Groups and committees will help drive new capabilities and create specialized sub-communities inside the foundation. - Enhance enterprise reliability
From upskilling programs to accredited vendors to predictable release cycles, Lewis wants enterprises to feel that OpenSearch offers certainty — not just innovation.
She believes the project has reached a turning point: with credibility established and vendor neutrality proven, the next phase is about converting momentum into long-term sustainability.
A Path Toward a Broader Foundation?
During our conversation, I asked Lewis whether she sees the OpenSearch Software Foundation eventually becoming home to other related projects, just as many Linux Foundation umbrellas have grown over time. She acknowledged that this could be part of the future.
As open source evolves, new adjacent technologies — especially in AI, search, and Observability — may find OpenSearch to be a natural home. For now, she is focused on realizing the full potential of the core project. But the door is open to the foundation expanding into a larger ecosystem as community and industry needs evolve.
The Momentum Is Real
Lewis is most excited about the performance improvements, the ten-fold increase in contributors, and the rapid diversification of membership. But what she returned to again and again was the project’s credibility — the assurance that OpenSearch will remain open, transparent, and community-governed.
That commitment is now bringing some of the world’s largest enterprises into the fold and positioning OpenSearch as a foundational layer of modern search, Observability, and AI operations.
