and giving rise to startups helping enterprises automate the flow of data from myriad, distributed internal and external data sources to new generative AI or GenAI tools. To rapidly benefit from AI, many enterprises are engaged in a vast project of re-architecting their IT infrastructures, giving a prominent place to the “data stack”—connecting and integrating internal data silos and external data sources.
RAG helps solve this problem but also represents a new data integration challenge. In the past, analytical tools used by business executives to support and inform their decisions and actions, mostly “ingested” so-called “structured data.” As in data stored in a spreadsheet, it had a pre-determined, well-defined structure that worked optimally with traditional business intelligence and decision-making support tools.