Knowledge layers that ground agents
RAG fails quietly: stale documents, wrong ACLs, and hallucinated citations. Readiness means metrics, not vibes.
Source of truth boundaries
Define authoritative corpora per workflow — policies, runbooks, filings, or tech docs — and block retrieval from everything else. Freshness SLAs and ownership matter as much as embeddings.
Evaluation that matches risk
Grounding checks, human rubrics, and regression suites should scale with materiality. Pair technical tests with operational drills (failover, partial corpus loss, tool outage).
See also governance for change control on corpora and prompts.
Frequently asked questions
When is RAG better than fine-tuning?
When answers must cite controlled documents that change frequently, or when policy requires traceability to specific sources.
How do we stop sensitive data leaking into embeddings?
Apply the same ACLs at ingest and retrieval, segregate tenants, encrypt at rest and in transit, and monitor exfiltration patterns in prompts and outputs.
What does “good” grounding look like in production?
High citation precision on held-out question sets, stable answers after corpus updates, and alarms when retrieval confidence drops or contradictory sources surface.
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