When technology flies as fast as AI, the new terminology and acronyms pop up just as fast.

As overworked business owners, it’s hard enough to keep up with our own business and customers, let alone the HOURLY innovations that AI companies are launching.

If you’ve been on YouTube or skimmed AI news, you may have seen this term:

RAG
(Retrieval Augmented Generation)

If sounds like a huge concept/architecture that’s designed for large-scale enterprises with ginormous data warehouses.

It’s not.

A small one-person business with a handful of Google Sheets and Google Docs could GREATLY benefit from a RAG.

What exactly is a RAG?

When you use ChatGPT, you are asking questions based on the billions and trillions of pages that ChatGPT has learned.

When ChatGPT was launched, it could only answer questions up to the date that it was trained.

Remember how annoyed you felt when it gave you that message that it didn’t know anything new since 2021?

Since they’ve added web search, you now have access to basically EVERYTHING, except one thing . . . YOUR data.

You can’t ask ChatGPT to create a social media post for your three top-selling items.

You can’t ask ChatGPT how many customers you have in Florida.

It has NO access to your data.

Actually you could ask . . . but you’d have to upload a customer or sales report file with each request.

Instead of uploading a file every time, a RAG lets you “privately merge” your own data with the entire AI knowledge base.

When you ask a question, your AI already has access to your data.

How does a RAG work?

First off . . . you don’t install a RAG. It’s just a concept. Like “local area network.”

“Retrieval Augmented Generation” simply means that you are “augmenting” the AI model with external data.

So you wouldn’t say, “'I’m installing a RAG.” You would say that “Our company setup a RAG for our AI.”

If you have OpenAI Plus, then you already have access to a RAG.

The OpenAI Assistants feature lets you upload files to your assistant.

You can upload up to 20 files — PDF and DOC files (Excel and CSV aren’t supported yet)

In the Assistant instructions, you tell OpenAI what the files contain and when they should be used.

“The attached file customers.pdf has all of our customer information. When I ask about customers, reference this data.”

When you ask questions to the Assistant, it will “augment” its knowledge with the information in the files you uploaded.

So if you ask a company-specific question, it will know to use the attached files.

RAG sounds cool. What’s the Catch?

There’s no catch, but the reality is that you will want to probably update your files A LOT.

Customers and inventory and sales data are always changing.

So that’s why you need automation to keep it up-to-date (which is super-easy as well).

Today I launched Day 4 of my Build Your Own AI Assistant Boot Camp.

As you can probably guess, I cover all of this in-depth, including how to build and manage your own RAG.

We’re focusing today on connecting your AI Assistant to your Google Calendar to both search and create new calendar events right from our AI chat.

If you’ve not signed up yet, there’s plenty of time . . .

👉🏼 Click here to register today and save $75 with BOOTCAMP2025!

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