From Messy Documents to Search-Ready Data with Unstructured & Elastic

Happy 2026! The Austin Elastic User Group is excited to kick off the New Year with a meetup on Thursday, January 22nd. Join us for an evening of learning, networking, and connecting with fellow Elastic
enthusiasts.

We'll have presentations followed by networking, refreshments, and pizza 🍕

⚡️ Interested in giving a talk? ⚡️
Are you interested presenting on 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 an email to meetups@elastic.co

📅Date and Time:
Thursday, January 22nd, from 5:30-8:00 pm CDT

📍Location:
Elastic Austin Office: 8th Floor
823 Congress Ave
Austin, TX 78701

🚗 Parking:
Parking options nearby include several garages or street parking in nearby blocks. Check out SpotHero to reserve a parking spot in advance!

🪧 Arrival Instructions:
When you arrive at the office, head to the 8th floor.

The main entrance to the building is on 9th Street, between Congress Ave and Brazos St.

📝 Agenda:

• 5:30 pm: Doors open
• 6:00 pm: Talk # 1: Srinivas Chilakapati (Principal Consulting Architect at Elastic)
• Break
• 6:45 pm From Messy Documents to Search-Ready Data with Unstructured & Elastic - Mike Downes (AI Solutions Engineer at Unstructured)
• 7:15-8:00 pm: Networking

💭 Talk Abstracts:
Mike Downes (AI Solutions Engineer at Unstructured)
Most real-world data doesn’t show up in a neat format—it shows up as PDFs, docs, and random files that are painful to search. Come learn how Unstructured and Elasticsearch work together to turn those messy documents into clean, search-ready data. We’ll go end-to-end from raw files to indexed content and show how better parsing and metadata make search (and RAG) work a lot better.