How a website AI assistant "learns" your products: what a knowledge base (RAG) is

Many owners hear "an AI assistant must be trained first" and assume it costs a fortune. In practice the common approach is not retraining a model but preparing a knowledge base for it.

What RAG means

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) simply means "look it up first, then answer". When a customer asks something, the system finds the most relevant passages in your knowledge base and asks the AI to compose an answer from them.

What you need to prepare

• Product descriptions, price lists, FAQs
• PDFs, contract templates, manuals
• Existing web pages

Hand them to the knowledge base and the AI can answer from them, with no engineer configuring question after question.

Why it is less likely to get things wrong

Because it answers from what you provided. If something is not in the material, a good design makes it say there is no information and hand over to a person instead of inventing an answer.

What about updates

When company information changes, update the knowledge base; the AI's answers follow, with no retraining.