09/03/2026
Everyone Is Adding RAG. Few Are Proving It Makes Money.
Progress highlights an important question: Does RAG create enough business value to justify itself?
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an AI approach that retrieves relevant information from a company's knowledge base before using it to generate a more accurate and contextual response.
RAG gives AI access to a company's knowledge base before answering a question. It first finds relevant information and then uses that information to generate a response. The biggest wins are happening where information retrieval itself is the job, including customer support, legal and compliance.
For consumer applications, RAG appears most valuable when customers face high uncertainty before purchasing. Reducing uncertainty can directly influence purchasing behavior--but the outcome must justify the ongoing infrastructure, inference, monitoring and maintenance costs.
The future won't belong to companies that add RAG everywhere. I
