RAG-Ready Patterns for Data Platforms

Chapter 1. The Pillars of RAG Readiness

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Large language models (LLMs) have captured the imagination of business and technology leaders alike. They can reason, summarize, and generate with astonishing fluency. They can write emails, draft code, and analyze contracts in ways that feel almost human. Yet ask them to answer a simple enterprise question “What is our revenue risk in the Asia-Pacific region if customer churn trends continue?” and they falter. Why? Because they lack the lifeblood of business intelligence: enterprise context.

An LLM without access to an organization’s trusted data is like a gifted consultant who has never opened the company’s books. Brilliant, persuasive, but ultimately ungrounded.

Enterprises have invested for decades in data platforms. We built warehouses, then lakes, and now fabrics. We’ve refined pipelines, governed metadata, and rolled out dashboards to every corner of the business. These systems have served us well in the era of descriptive and diagnostic analytics. ...