Stage 2 of enterprise AI adoption: data and retrieval

This is part 2 of a series that started with the full reference diagram in part 0 and covered identity and the gateway in part 1 . Stage 2 covers the column marked 2 on that diagram, DATA & RETRIEVAL, with three boxes: Enterprise data sources, Ingestion & indexing, and Retrieval index. The Retrieval index box is labeled "RAG, scoped by role," and roles only exist once stage 1's Roles & scopes box is in place, which is why this stage comes second. Nothing in this stage writes anything or sends anything, so the worst outcome available here is a wrong answer. I use the same company as in part 1, Qingchuan, about 40 people, 8 engineers and 2 in marketing. Qingchuan is made up and only serves to walk the stage. Coming out of stage 1, everyone logs in through the identity provider, every call goes through the gateway, and each person carries a role. What they can ask about is still whatever the model already knew, because none of Qingchuan's own material has been indexed yet. Enterprise data sources: docs, tickets, DB The first box names the internal systems that are in scope. The label is "docs, tickets, DB". At Qingchuan that means the engineering wiki, the support ticket system, and a customer table in the product database. Without a written list, "the AI has our data" is a sentence nobody can check, and the scope of an incident cannot be stated when one happens. The property that matters here is that each of those systems already has its own access rules, and those rules do not travel with the content. A wiki page restricted to engineering is restricted by the wiki. Copy its text into an index and the restriction stays behind in the wiki. Done looks like this: a written list of the systems in scope, each line carrying the access rule that system enforces today and who administers it, and anything not on the list stays out of the index until it is added to the list. Ingestion & indexing: chunk, embed Content is pulled from those systems, split into chunks, and turned i