Guides
Enterprise RAG that survives year one
From chat-with-PDF demos to permission-aware, evaluated retrieval products.
Bottom line. Enterprise RAG fails when chunks, ACLs, and ownership are optional. Rebuild retrieval as a governed data product before you tune prompts.
Why the first wave stalled
Naive chunking destroyed structure. Access control lived in the UI. Evaluation was three clever questions in a meeting. When answers went wrong, teams argued theology — model vs data vs prompt — without instrumentation.
Rebuild checklist
- Carry document ACLs with chunks.
- Preserve headings and lineage; store parent context.
- Combine keyword/metadata filters with dense retrieval.
- Track citation precision continuously, not quarterly.
Related Frontier reporting
FAQ
Is vector search enough for enterprise RAG?
Rarely. Hybrid search, ACL propagation, citation validity, and a named corpus owner matter more than embedding model fashion.
What does a wave-two architecture include?
Permission-aware retrieval, hybrid ranking, continuous golden-set evaluation, and regenerate-after-sync tests.