When a Top-N Retrieval Chatbot Isn’t Enough: The Case for Data-Driven AI
Imagine asking your policy system a simple question and getting a perfect answer in under a second. Now imagine asking it to analyse fifteen years of reports, submissions, evaluations, and operational metrics. One requires a chatbot. The other requires an engine. Policy teams often reach for RAG because it looks neat and tidy. A chatbot that can trawl internal guidance, regulatory texts, consultation documents and memos feels like a small miracle. And to be fair, a well-tuned Retrieval-Augmented Generation system is a brilliant librarian. It fetches the right paragraph, summarises dense text, and saves you from spelunking through document drives that haven’t been organised since John Key was in office. ...