Go on, ask a plain chatbot about your refund policy. Out comes a confident, fluent, totally invented reply. That’s the gap retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) was built to close.
Lots of AI projects die between the demo and the release. The demo handles five hand-picked questions like a champ. Production gets five thousand messy ones, a security review and a CFO.
The prototype worked on a hosted API. Everyone raved. Then usage tripled. Legal wanted to know where the prompts go. And the monthly invoice looked like a typo. Welcome to LLM cloud deployment.