Three mechanisms for getting organisational knowledge into an agent, with three different failure modes. Answer the questions in priority order — the first two usually settle it — and watch the recommendation shift.
Work through the questions on the left. Most production systems end up composing more than one mechanism rather than picking a single winner.
Wrong chunks, a missed document, or a superseded version produce a confident answer grounded in the wrong material. No error is raised. The chunk that says "effective until Q2 2025" reads identically to current policy unless something preserved that distinction.
Errors, timeouts, and rate limits are visible — a genuine advantage — but they cost latency on every request, and the agent must handle the failure rather than merely receiving worse input.
Material may be attended to unevenly, particularly mid-context. Nothing errors; quality degrades in ways that are hard to attribute. Then it fails hard at the boundary — one token over and something gets dropped.