What to Include in a RAG Implementation Proposal
Your support team answers the same questions repeatedly, looking through manuals, policies and internal knowledge bases. A knowledge assistant could help. Before requesting proposals, specify which questions one team needs answered, which sources it can use, and how you will verify the answers. That gives you a practical basis for comparing bids.
What should the first pilot do?
Consider a fictional technical support team. A customer asks whether a spare part fits an older model. The assistant checks approved service documentation and points the team to the relevant passage. If the documents leave compatibility unclear, the assistant flags the uncertainty and the team decides how to respond. For acceptance testing, include one case each with clear, contradictory and missing evidence.
Start with one team, one product area and one maintained source. This could be a SharePoint library, a Confluence space or a collection in your document management system. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) finds relevant material and passes it to the language model to support its answer.
A knowledge assistant for technical support
- 01
Support question
Does the spare part fit the model?
- 02
Approved sources
Search respects document versions and access permissions.
- 03
Answer with evidence
The answer cites the passage or flags missing evidence.
What to compare in a RAG implementation proposal
| Area | What the proposal should specify |
|---|---|
| Data source | Which repository is connected? How do updates, deletions and permission changes reach the assistant? |
| Users and access | Which roles take part? How do you verify that each role can retrieve only the material it can access? |
| Answer quality | Who supplies representative questions and expected sources? How will incorrect answers, unsupported answers and justified abstentions be assessed? |
| Deliverables | Will you receive a working assistant, documented tests and a report? Who fixes issues found during the pilot? |
| Hosting and handover | Where do search and the language model run? What recurring costs apply? Which configuration and tests will your team receive? |
Enforce access permissions during retrieval. Use accounts with different permissions to verify which documents each can retrieve and which content can appear in answers. The Microsoft documentation on document-level access control explains one implementation. See also how to connect a document management system to RAG.
What determines the cost?
Additional connectors, inconsistent permissions and poorly structured files can matter more than document count. A maintained collection with uniform permissions has a different scope from scanned manuals with several versions and access rules that vary by customer. Ask providers to quote setup, acceptance testing and recurring operations separately.
If your existing platform offers search or an assistant, run the same questions through it. Define the pilot around whatever gap remains, such as cross-source retrieval, permission handling or integration into a support portal.
Discuss a RAG pilot
Send me three representative questions, your main source and the role of the intended users. If permissions vary, briefly describe the groups. An outline of your document collection is enough for the initial conversation.