It hasn’t read your documents. Unless someone hands it the right pages, right before it answers.

Mr. Miller wants his overdraft raised to €18,000. Sarah asks the assistant whether she can approve it herself.

Without your pages, the LLM answers from what it learned in training: generic, and no use to your bank. Adding the right pages to its prompt, in its context window, right before it answers, is called RAGhet, retrieval-augmented generation. The hard part: finding the right pages.

Your bank has thousands of pages, and its context window holds a few. Same question: scroll to follow the RAG search through the shelves.

The search kept the three closest passages and added them to the prompt, in the context window; the answer cites each one with a number: a citation you can open. That’s RAG: search first, then answer.

The search ranks every passage of the library, the archived 2023 policy included. How many should RAG hand over?

Now you run the RAG. Choose which documents are on the shelves, pick a question, and run the search.

RAG only finds what’s on the shelves, and can’t tell a current page from an archived one. Unlike a hallucination, this wrong answer comes from a real page: an outdated one. Keep the library clean.

Here is what a RAG system does behind the scenes, in order. Scroll: the diagram moves forward, and the trace shows what each part passes to the next.

Answer only from the sources below and cite them like [1]. If they don’t contain the answer, say so.

[1] Miller Joinery client file: Overdraft limit: €10,000. Mr. Miller has asked to raise it to €18,000. One invoice is 12 days overdue.
[2] Overdraft policy (2026) §3: Approval: relationship managers may approve business overdraft limits up to €20,000, provided no invoice is more than 30 days overdue. Above €20,000, the credit committee decides.
[3] Overdraft policy (2026) §1: Scope: this policy covers authorised overdrafts on business current accounts.

Can I approve Mr. Miller’s overdraft increase to €18,000 myself?

Answer only from the sources below and cite them like [1]. If they don’t contain the answer, say so.

[1] Miller Joinery client file: Overdraft limit: €10,000. Mr. Miller has asked to raise it to €18,000. One invoice is 12 days overdue.
[2] Overdraft policy (2026) §3: Approval: relationship managers may approve business overdraft limits up to €20,000, provided no invoice is more than 30 days overdue. Above €20,000, the credit committee decides.
[3] Overdraft policy (2026) §1: Scope: this policy covers authorised overdrafts on business current accounts.

Can I approve Mr. Miller’s overdraft increase to €18,000 myself?

Prompt, search, best results, context, answer: every RAG system follows these steps. When an answer is wrong, one of them failed, most often the search.