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. ...

November 27, 2025 · 5 min

Chain-of-Thought Hijacking: What Every AI-Enabled Business Must Know

When I was in Year 6, my history homework was supposed to be full of long, serious answers. There were fifty kids in the class, and I remember wondering — does the teacher actually read every word? So, halfway through one answer, I slipped in a few lines from a song. My heart sank when I handed it in, expecting trouble. But when I got the copy back, there it was — a big red tick on that very page. I had, in some sense, hijacked the teacher’s chain of thought. ...

November 6, 2025 · 4 min