Case studyArchitecture, governance, and how to adapt this pattern in a pilot
Business use case
Problem
Teams want a governed Q&A assistant before they stand up vector infrastructure. Pilots still need citations and honest “I don’t know” behaviour.
Who benefits
- Compliance & legal, answers tied to named policy documents
- HR / IT, self-serve policy questions without ticket volume
- Platform engineering, a portable pattern that swaps seed search for Azure AI Search, Vertex AI Search, or pgvector later
Success metrics
- ≥ 90% of pilot answers include at least one cited document title
- “Unknown” rate tracked when retrieval returns no hits
- Time-to-first-demo under two weeks using seed corpora
Solution
Retrieve top policy chunks with keyword scoring over shared seed documents, then call generateText with cite-only instructions. Same seeds power Azure and AWS examples for apples-to-apples comparisons.
Technical implementation
Stack
- AI SDK
generateText - Shared seeds in
lib/demos/seed-documents.ts - OpenAI or AI Gateway via
getLanguageModel()
Architecture
Lightweight RAG in production, retrieve from seeds, generate with strict cite-only instructions.
Outcomes and learnings
Prove grounding and citation discipline on seeds before you pay for embeddings and index ops.
- Keyword search is enough for pilot governance conversations
- Return
retrievalmetadata so reviewers know when answers are under-informed - Unify document IDs across clouds before production indexing
Delivery playbookDiscovery → pilot → scale
- 1Discovery2–4 wks
Inventory policy corpora and citation requirements; agree on unknown-answer behaviour when retrieval is empty.
- 2Pilot6–8 wks
Ship seed RAG to HR/compliance reviewers; measure citation rate and override frequency.
- 3Scaleongoing
Replace keyword search with managed vector index; keep document IDs stable for audit.
Where else this appliesLightweight retrieval plus cite-only generation is the right first step wherever answers must be tied to approved text, not model memory.
HR and people policies
Benefits, leave, and conduct questions with citations to the employee handbook.
Security standards
Developers ask about approved libraries and data handling; answers link to internal standards pages.
Sales enablement
Competitive battlecards and pricing guardrails grounded in official GTM docs.
Manufacturing SOPs
Operators query maintenance procedures on the plant floor with source IDs for audit.
Start in production with seed or keyword search; graduate to pgvector, Turbopuffer, or an enterprise search index without changing the API contract shown here.