RAG to Riches: AI application can transform companies' use of data

It’s only in the last few years that people outside the realm of science fiction began talking about artificial intelligence in a serious way.

In November 2022, OpenAI launched its user-friendly interface ChatGPT, and suddenly, people were forced to take notice.

“Three years ago, nobody was talking about AI,” said Jonathan Hodges, vice president of technology for Classy Llama. “Unless you were in the field, you didn’t know what was going on.”

But Hodges is in the field, and he said the partners at Classy Llama began researching and talking about AI early.

“It was on our radar from the start,” he said. “That first year, it wasn’t really ready to change most businesses. It was cool, but it wasn’t yet transformational in its impact.”

It was only in late 2023 that the industry started seeing some new applications, called retrieval augmented generation, or RAG, with capacity to transform business and industry, according to Hodges.

“We saw the writing on the wall – this was going to change the world,” he said. “It’s going to be used everywhere. People won’t have a choice, because it just creates so much value.”

Greg Tull, Classy Llama’s marketing director, said the company is now well over a year into developing its own internal AI offering and its external service offerings to clients.

The company offers a series of entry points into AI for business, starting with AI: Demystify, a program to help businesses begin to integrate and adopt AI resources, and AI Traction, which helps organizations embrace AI technology through a structured, step-by-step approach, according to its website.

But Tull is most excited about RAG. As Tull explains it, this is a way of making AI personal for a company with a discrete AI platform that incorporates only a company’s data. Unlike Gemini or ChatGPT, a company’s own AI system – called a private corpus model – doesn’t feed data into the larger AI universe, creating a security risk for proprietary information. It’s available only within a company, and even in that setting, there are security levels ensuring that information is available only to those who are authorized to access it.

What’s RAG?
Companies have varying amounts of data, based on their size and scope and the length of their operation. That data can be amassed and then easily retrieved and referenced with a custom AI application.

But Tull said the data goes well past spreadsheets.

“In the context of manufacturing, there’s all kinds of tribal knowledge,” he said. “Think of a machine operator who’s been on the same machine for 30 years, and he’s leaving. He knows everything about that machine, and he’s walking out the door.”

Tull said that operator can sit down for a conversational interview, and the RAG can pull a transcript and produce a standard operating procedure that can go into the organization’s data warehouse.

“The RAG can be queried about information on that machine by anyone in the operation with the authorization to receive it,” he said.

There are many advantages to using a RAG, Tull said. Notably, information and insights are available unbiased from a human perspective – not like asking a plant manager, who likely wants to present issues in the best possible light.

Tull said Classy Llama has implemented and is beta testing RAG, and he accesses it every day. As marketing director, he knows enough to understand general context, but the RAG can provide nuanced information about anything in the company.

“If your company’s 50 years old, maybe you have hundreds of employees and you’ve done multitudes of projects,’ Tull said. “No one can understand all of it – except that your RAG can, because it has superhuman insight and perfect recall.”

The Springfield market
Classy Llama is not the only provider that’s elbows-deep in a sudsy sink of AI.

A February announcement by Pitt Technology Group showed that company, too, offers a suite of AI solutions for business. Among these are custom AI training, hybrid and cloud-integrated AI solutions, Microsoft Copilot integration, hosted AI services and on-premises AI infrastructure. This latter offering is described in the company’s announcement as “fully managed AI hardware and software running inside the customer’s own network for maximum data security and performance.”

Tyler Drenon, technology specialist with Pitt Technology Group, confirmed that his company has had a RAG pipeline inside its own company for quite some time. Pitt’s general manager, Kevin Waterland, added, “We were approached by customers to put similar things in place, and we started offering this out to new customers four weeks ago.”

At technology development company Carefully Crafted, co-founder Brad Jones said clients are asking about RAG.

“I think people are starting to realize they might be missing out on something there,” Jones said.

Specifically, customers are asking how to take their internal data and business information and put AI into it so that it’s easier to interact with, Jones said.

“We’ve set it up for a couple of people, and I expect it to continue,” he said.

Like Classy Llama and Pitt Technology Group, Jones said his company is becoming more focused on its AI efforts.

“We’re doing a lot of web building with AI tools that we’ve created, and we’re trying to incorporate that at every level,” he said. “There’s an endless list of things you could do with AI.”

Jones said the biggest current push for his company is agentic AI.

“Agents are a hot topic right now,” he said.

He explained it as using an AI system to help make decisions. The user gives it a task – like finding the cheapest plane ticket on a certain date – and the AI agent thinks through a way to approach the problem without requiring specific, step-by-step instructions. An AI agent can move “crazy fast,” Jones said, and can go as far as booking and buying a ticket and sending it to the user when the work is done.

“We’re using those for all kinds of stuff – data retrieval, filling out profiles, research analysis,” Jones said.

Early stages
While Classy Llama has implemented RAG into its own operations, Tull said there are so far only three client companies – it’s kind of the ground floor, he said. Two of those three companies are local.

“It’s not a high-speed implementation, especially because it’s so cutting-edge – you’re still problem-solving as you go along,” he said.

Although Tull declined to name clients, Tiffany Claussen, CEO of Amprod LLC, told Springfield Business Journal last month that Amprod is one of them.

Classy Llama’s AI traction plan, called Discovery, is the entry point into the AI realm, helping to demystify the subject and uncover its possibilities for a company. It costs $5,000. Beyond that, offerings and pricing plans vary by service and client.

“What we’re really after is helping those organizations to stay relevant and to preserve ways of life that we believe have independent value,” he said. “Without sustainability and a competitive advantage, we could lose out to more tech-forward hubs in the world.”

AI can bring back competitive advantage to the region and to American manufacturing, Hodges said – an advantage that has at times been lost to low-cost, low-wage areas of the globe.

“This allows for opportunities to continue to be relevant in the manufacturing sector,” he said. “You don’t often hear tech and manufacturing associating with each other, but with what AI is doing, you’re seeing humanoid robots – autonomous humanoid robots – deployed in manufacturing facilities. It’s mostly large companies at this point, and they’ve only had them as of the last six months, but that’s going to roll downhill.”