Six-stage evidence pipeline aims to make enterprise agentic RAG answers more reliable

A solutions architect's assistant produced a polished brief citing an outdated RFP revision and a revenue figure taken from a slide deck rather than the finance system, showing that a grounded answer can still use the wrong evidence. The article argues teams should first examine retrieval architecture, asking what evidence the model could see, where it searched, and how recently it was updated, before switching models. It defines agentic RAG as a system where the model chooses tools and retries when evidence is weak, while the application keeps control of security, access, validation, and stopping conditions. The proposed design is a six-stage pipeline (prepare, plan, route, select, assemble, answer) with a continuous data-preparation stage and per-question stages that loop back within set limits. The piece also distinguishes indexed retrieval, which is fast but may be stale, from live retrieval, which is needed for current figures, and stresses tracking version, ownership, and permissions as metadata.