RAG Executives Can Trust

RAG is not magic search. It is a controlled library plus a model that quotes from it.

When the library is a junk drawer, the answers sound confident and go stale.

A regional bank built an internal assistant over SharePoint. It cited a 2019 lending memo as current policy. A lender almost used it on a live file. The problem was not the model. The corpus had no owner and no retire date.

The claim

Executives should trust RAG only when every retrieved chunk has a source, an owner, and a freshness rule they would accept in a board pack.

Minimum trust bar

• Each document has an owner and a review date.
• Answers show citations a person can open.
• Stale sources are blocked from retrieval, not just labeled.
• High-risk topics require a human confirm before action.

The bank cut the corpus to 180 controlled docs. They added owners. They blocked anything older than the review window. Answer volume dropped. Trust rose. Becuase fewer answers beat wrong ones.

Questions after the meeting

• Who owns the corpus this quarter?
• What gets removed when a policy changes?
• Which topics are too risky for auto-answer?