Techstrong TV — Mon, May 25

Beyond RAG — Inside Pinecone Nexus and the Knowledge Engine for Agents

Alan Shimel with Jeff Zhu

n this episode of TechStrong TV, Alan Shimel sits down with Jeff Zhu, VP of Product at Pinecone, to dig into Pinecone Nexus and KnowQL — Pinecone's biggest bet yet on the shift from human-driven retrieval to agent-driven knowledge infrastructure. Jeff explains why the access patterns for vector search have fundamentally changed, why classic RAG starts to break down once agents are firing 20–30 tool calls per task, and how Pinecone Nexus turns raw data into task-optimized knowledge artifacts that agents can act on directly. He also breaks down KnowQL, a new declarative query language built for the agentic era, and shares how Pinecone is using its own knowledge engine internally to dramatically reduce dashboards and rethink how the business runs.