Elastic{ON} 2025: Search AI and agents take centrestage in India’s AI push

Bengaluru witnessed the future of enterprise AI come alive with Elastic{ON} 2025. The flagship event of Elastic, The Search AI Company, showcased how AI, search, observability, and security are converging to redefine the way enterprises innovate and operate. Over 4,000 developers, architects, and tech leaders explored live demos, engaged in hands-on workshops, and even cheered for the winners of a high-stakes hackathon.

With over 80% of Indian organisations exploring autonomous AI agents, Elastic{ON} highlighted how real-time, contextualised data powers intelligent search, observability, and cloud-native security. The event featured insightful keynotes from Ash Kulkarni, CEO, Elastic, and Baha Azarmi, Global Vice President, Customer Engineering, Elastic, along with other notable speakers such as Sampath Manickam, CTO, National Stock Exchange of India.

A key highlight was the keynote panel, “Beyond the Hype: Real-World GenAI Use Cases for the Indian Enterprise,” which brought together industry leaders — Abhishek Awasthi, Senior Vice President, Nykaa; Rashid Feroze, Head - Infrastructure Security, CRED; and Himanshu Gulati, Vice President, Airtel — to discuss how Indian enterprises are moving from experimentation to execution in their GenAI journeys.

From digital rails to AI highways

Karthik Rajaram, Area Vice President & General Manager, Elastic India, kicked off the Bengaluru edition of Elastic{ON}, setting the stage for the theme “Forge the Future.” Highlighting India’s nation-scale digital infrastructure – UPI processing 20+ billion transactions monthly, Digilocker serving 540 million users, Aadhar and the India AI Mission’s $1.2B investment roadmap – he illustrated how Elastic’s foundational technologies are enabling enterprises to innovate rapidly with real-time data, AI insights, and secure, scalable operations.

Karthik also shared how Elastic empowers India’s developer community through three pillars: choice, innovation and ecosystem. Model-agnostic and ready-to-deploy features give developers flexibility, while efficient vector search and governed AI provide the tools to innovate. Finally, Elastic’s ecosystem connects customers, partners, and hyperscalers, enabling innovation at scale.

What’s new, what’s next?

“AI is the most disruptive, exciting and magical technology since the creation of the internet,” said Ashutosh Kulkarni, CEO of Elastic, during his keynote. Joined by Bahaaldine Azarmi, Global Vice President, Customer Engineering, Kulkarni unveiled Elastic’s newest capabilities in Search AI and agentic workflows, including the Elastic Agent Builder – a framework for creating AI agents that leverage hybrid search for reasoning and decision-making.

Azarmi demonstrated how Agent Builder enables context engineering, tool creation, and transparent “thinking process” visualisation, removing the black box from AI workflows. The keynote also touched on observability and security, with Kulkarni announcing MetricsDB for Elastic Observability and introducing Streams, a centralised UI in Kibana to unify applications. Highlighting evolving threats, he also revealed Cloud Connect, a new security capability for hyperscaler environments, alongside an on-demand developer training platform to upskill professionals.

“Elastic Cloud Serverless was built for speed, scale and simplicity,” said Ajay Nair, Group Vice President (GM, Platform), Elastic. Nair explored how Elasticsearch’s stateless architecture boosts performance, scalability, and ease of use, while freeing developers from administrative overhead. Using Kubernetes as a base layer, the platform now offers zero load spikes, AI-enabled search, observability, security, and competitive pricing — all engineered to meet modern enterprise demands.

Agentic AI in action

Jeff Vestal, Principal Customer Enterprise Architect, demonstrated Agent Builder’s capabilities for creating AI agents that can perceive, reason, plan, and execute actions. Showcasing semantic search, hybrid search, and ES/QL, he walked the audience through building custom tools, including a financial data intelligence assistant. Vestal also previewed multi-agent orchestration and unified chat experiences, emphasising practical, real-world applications.

James Spiteri, leading AI and automation efforts at Elastic, revealed next-generation agentic AI workflows for security. Highlighting capabilities like automatic query generation, attack discovery, and workflow automation, he introduced the Value Report, a tool measuring the ROI of AI security features, demonstrating how Elastic AI reduces analyst time by up to 40% while improving threat detection accuracy by 35%.

The final session, led by Rishikesh Radhakrishnan, Senior Solutions Architect Lead and Mark Puddick, GenAI Search Specialist (APJ), Elastic, highlighted the speed and simplicity of building modern search applications using Elasticsearch and LLMs like Claude. They showcased a heritage location and restaurant finder, combining semantic search with traditional keyword matching, while sharing best practices like iterative development, prompt tuning, and architecture documentation. The pair also shared best practices such as organising code into sections, and creating an architecture document to manage project complexity and ensure effective development.

The future of AI belongs to data-driven enterprises

Elastic{ON} 2025 highlighted how Search AI is becoming central to the enterprise AI stack. With launches like Agent Builder, MetricsDB, and Cloud Connect, Elastic has positioned itself as a key enabler of real-time intelligence, observability, and AI-driven decision-making.

For India, the event reinforced its growing role in global AI transformation. With AI projected to add $500-600 billion to India’s GDP by 2035, enterprises that harness real-time, contextualised data will lead. Elastic positions itself as the platform helping India’s organisations – from startups to large enterprises – to innovate at scale, leverage AI insights, and build the next generation of intelligent, data-driven solutions.