Name: Replacing Third-Party Search with AI Agents: A Marketplace Case Study
Start: 2026-10-30T13:00:00-0400
End: 2026-10-30T13:45:00-0400

Replacing Third-Party Search with AI Agents: A Marketplace Case Study

Friday October 30, 2026 1:00pm - 1:45pm EDT

Harshman Rotunda

Every growing company buys its way out of hard problems. You're small, the roadmap is long, and a small SaaS contract buys you a year of engineering time. That's the right call, until it isn't.

This talk is a field report on one of those inflection points. Courtyard is a marketplace for physical collectibles, and for years our search was powered by a third-party vendor. It worked, until it became a liability. Costs rose, latency kept increasing, support was hard to come by. With AI agents becoming more capable, we were tempted to build a replacement. In this session, we'll cover the decision, what implementation looked like, how maintenance has proven to be after the fact, and what it's taught us about using AI in software development moving forward.

Speakers

Joe Petrich

SVP of Engineering, Courtyard

I am the SVP of Engineering at Courtyard, where we are making trading collectibles fast, fun and frictionless. Previously, I was a Software Engineer in Site Reliability Engineering at Google, and before that I was on the Google Pay partner engineering team, working with financial... Read More →

Friday October 30, 2026 1:00pm - 1:45pm EDT
Harshman Rotunda

Engage with Big Ideas, Developer Tools for Immediate use

Pittsburgh TechFest 2026

Joe Petrich

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Pittsburgh TechFest 2026

Joe Petrich

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