As many of us in the information retrieval (IR) research community know and
appreciate, search is far from being a solved problem. Millions of people
struggle with tasks on search engines every day. Often, their struggles relate
to the intrinsic complexity of their task and the failure of search systems to
fully understand the task and serve relevant results. The task motivates the
search, creating the gap/problematic situation that searchers attempt to
bridge/resolve and drives search behavior as they work through different task
facets. Complex search tasks require more than support for rudimentary fact
finding or re-finding. Research on methods to support complex tasks includes
work on generating query and website suggestions, personalizing and
contextualizing search, and developing new search experiences, including those
that span time and space. The recent emergence of generative artificial
intelligence (AI) and the arrival of assistive agents, or copilots, based on
this technology, has the potential to offer further assistance to searchers,
especially those engaged in complex tasks. There are profound implications from
these advances for the design of intelligent systems and for the future of
search itself. This article, based on a keynote by the author at the 2023 ACM
SIGIR Conference, explores these issues and charts a course toward new horizons
in information access guided by AI copilots.

搜索、复杂任务、生成人工智能、辅助代理和信息访问是这篇研究论文的关键词，通过作者在 2023 年 ACM SIGIR 大会上的主题演讲，探讨了这些问题，并为 AI 辅助代理引领下的信息访问开辟了新的前景。