What is RAG? A Beginner's Guide to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (With a Full Pipeline Walkthrough)

If you've ever wondered how ChatGPT-style apps can suddenly "know" about your company's internal documents, product manuals, or legal files without being retrained, the answer is almost always RAG — Retrieval-Augmented Generation. In this post, we'll break down what RAG is, why it exists, and walk through the full pipeline step-by-step with a real example. 1. What is RAG? Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an AI framework that integrates an information retrieval component into the generatio