Elastic & Zello meetup in Austin: Elastic ELSER in Production

The Elastic Austin User Group & Zello, are partnering for a joint meetup on Thursday, June 26th. We'll have presentations from Zello and Elastic, followed by food, refreshments, and networking.

📅 Date & Time:
Thursday, June 26th - 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM CDT

📍Location:
Zello Office - 1717 W 6th St, Austin, TX 78703 - 4th floor

🚗 Parking:
Attendees can park in either garage and pull a ticket. There will be a Zello employee at the meetup who will validate parking for the evening.

🪧 Arrival Instructions:
The Zello office is on the 4th floor of the building. Attendees can use either the garage or front entrance to get to the elevator. There will be a Zello team member available once attendees get off the elevator and directing you down the hall to the entrance.

📝 Agenda:

• 5:30 pm: Doors open; say hi and eat some food
• 6:00 pm: Talk # 1 - Elastic ELSER in Production: Powering a RAG Voice Assistant for Enterprise Customers
  Nikita Pestrov - Senior Analytics Engineer at Zello
  Jessica Monteiro - AI Product Manager at Zello
• 6:30 pm: Talk # 2 - details coming soon!
  Terry Dupureur - Senior Solutions Architect at Elastic
• 7:00 pm: Networking & refreshments

💭Talk Abstracts:
Elastic ELSER in Production: Powering a RAG Voice Assistant for Enterprise Customers
Abstract: Nikita Pestrov and Jessica Monteiro from Zello will share how Elastic ELSER played a central role in launching a RAG-powered Voice
Assistant — Ella — from a fast prototype to a customer-facing, multi-tenant production deployment in just 3 months. The talk focuses on how ElasticSearch and ELSER enabled semantic search at scale, supported rapid experimentation, and adapted to meet the demands of enterprise environments, including content isolation, real-time latency, and operational robustness.We will highlight how Elastic accelerated the RAG architecture’s development and remained flexible enough to serve complex customer use cases. The team will also share how they evaluated and improved retrieval quality across use cases using both automated and human-in-the-loop techniques.
This session is ideal for teams building with Elastic in LLM workflows, or anyone scaling RAG systems for real-world, high-impact applications.

Speakers:
Nikita Pestrov is a Senior Analytics Engineer at Zello, a leading push-to-talk communications platform for frontline teams. Data Leader with over 8 years of experience specializing in developing scalable and impactful data products for clients like Mastercard, the World Bank, and PWC. Skilled in building distributed cloud-native data pipelines, with a deep foundation in AI/ML and SaaS product development.

Jessica Monteiro is an AI Product Manager at Zello, a leading push-to-talk communications platform for frontline teams. She has over four years of experience leading product strategy and development in Real Estate SaaS, streaming media, and AI. Previously, she worked at Comcast and REEF Technology (Series D), driving large-scale initiatives and collaborating with cross-functional teams. Jessica is passionate about user experience, data-driven decision-making, and building impactful products.

🎤 Want to present at our next meetup?
Are you interested in presenting your Elastic use case? We welcome 5-10 minute lightning talks, 45-minute deep dives, and everything in between. If you're interested, please send us an email at meetups@elastic.co.