The short version
  • Choose authoritative sources and assign content owners first.
  • Preserve document identity, permissions, and update timestamps.
  • Evaluate retrieval separately from final answer quality.

01

Start with source governance

Inventory authoritative repositories, remove duplicate sources, assign owners, and define which audiences can access each collection. Retrieval quality cannot repair unclear ownership.

02

Design ingestion and retrieval

Preserve headings, document identifiers, dates, and access metadata. Test chunk sizes and retrieval methods against representative questions instead of selecting defaults by intuition.

03

Build an evaluation loop

Maintain test questions with expected sources, measure retrieval recall and answer faithfulness, inspect failed queries, and rerun evaluations after content or model changes.

Common questions

Questions worth asking

Is a vector database required for an AI agent knowledge base?

Not always. Keyword search, structured queries, graph retrieval, and vector retrieval can be combined based on the content and question types.