The demo hides the operating environment
A controlled demonstration usually uses clean documents, simple permissions and cooperative questions. Production introduces duplicated content, conflicting versions, access boundaries, ambiguous queries and users who expect consistent answers.
Retrieval quality is not measured
Teams often evaluate the final answer without measuring whether the right sources were retrieved. Separate retrieval, grounding and answer-quality evaluation makes failures easier to diagnose and improve.
Ownership stops at deployment
RAG needs content ownership, access reviews, evaluation datasets, incident handling and monitoring for quality, latency and cost. Without an operating model, performance degrades as data and models change.
References and further reading
Official and independent guidance used to support this practical overview. Product capabilities and pricing can change; verify current provider documentation before making a final decision.