What Is Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)? A Complete Guide for Businesses | Towards AI

Author(s): Anthony Usoro

Originally published on Towards AI.

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If you’ve spent any time with ChatGPT, Claude, or any large language model, you’ve probably run into this moment: you ask a specific question about your business, your industry, or a recent event, and the AI gives you an answer that sounds completely confident — and is completely wrong.

This isn’t a bug you can patch. It’s a structural limitation of how large language models work, and it’s the reason a growing number of businesses — especially in regulated or high-stakes sectors — are turning to an architecture called Retrieval-Augmented Generation, or RAG.