RAG Readiness & Corpus Assessment
A corpus is ready for RAG only when sampled sources can answer the intended questions under recorded authority, access, freshness, coverage, and ownership conditions.
A source inventory can look complete and still fail on the questions that matter. We sample the corpus, test its access and answerability, and identify the work required before a RAG build can rely on it. Whether to proceed, narrow the use case, or pause becomes a recorded call, backed by the readiness dossier, ranked corpus gaps, and named remediation owners.
Some of the 500+ brands we've worked with
See all references
The run order, and who signs each step off
How we work
The assessment begins with the questions people expect the system to answer. We trace those questions to representative sources, record the gaps, and make a readiness call for each use case.
Set the assessment boundary
We agree which use cases are being assessed, which sources represent them, who owns those sources, and who can decide whether the build proceeds. Your knowledge owner confirms the use cases and decision boundary.
Inspect the corpus
The sample is checked for authority, access, structure, metadata, quality, coverage, freshness, and answerability. A missing permission or disputed source owner stays visible as a gap. Your source owner confirms which gaps are genuine versus missing evidence.
Test readiness and exceptions
Representative questions and difficult exceptions show where the corpus holds up and where it does not. We also check whether the proposed use case has quietly expanded beyond the evidence reviewed. The person with the authority to call it decides which use case passes, needs remediation, or stops.
Prioritize the remediation path
We put the corpus fixes in decision order, with an owner and review date for every critical gap. Your authority chooses whether to remediate, narrow the use case, proceed, or pause. Your authority decides whether to remediate, narrow scope, proceed, or pause.
Named artifacts you keep
What you get
The result separates usable source paths from the ones that need repair, a smaller use case, or evidence that was not available during the review.
Roadmap
RAG readiness dossier and corpus remediation plan
The readiness decision by use case, with source authority, access, structure, quality, coverage, freshness, and answerability findings.
Risk register
Sampled corpus gaps and source-dependency inventory
The sampled evidence, assessment assumptions, cross-team dependencies, unresolved questions, and critical exceptions.
Test evidence
Readiness evaluation and critical-exception record
The test cases and findings used to assess answerability, coverage, freshness, access, and other critical corpus slices.
Decision record
Accepted readiness status and next-review log
The accepted readiness status, remediation conditions, owners, unresolved risks, and next review date.
Scope and honest limits
When to bring us in
Use this assessment when the build idea is clear but the source material, access, or ownership behind it is still uncertain.
A good fit when
- Priority questions and source owners are known, but the representative documents still do not show whether the corpus can answer them.
- The corpus inventory looks complete, yet access, freshness, coverage, or answerability may still block the planned use cases.
- Corpus fixes are piling up, while the person who must decide whether the RAG build proceeds lacks a ranked remediation path.
- Your source authority and access are recorded, but structure, quality, coverage, freshness, and answerability have not been tested together.
- Representative documents exist, yet dependencies, failure cases, and critical exceptions are missing from the readiness evidence.
- Readiness tests produce gaps, but remediation priorities, owners, and the final build decision are not connected in one record.
- A use case is marked ready, while the handoff into corpus improvement or RAG implementation still exceeds what the review covered.
Better handled as other work when
- You want the sampled-source readiness call accepted as a regulatory filing or audit determination. Legal effect and certification remain with your authority.
- You need the corpus to answer every current or future question, although the assessment covers only sampled sources and intended use cases.
- You need corpus remediation, new data acquisition, or production implementation delivered, because this assessment stops at the readiness handoff.
If one of these is closer to your situation, start here instead: View the parent service
Engineers who ship production AI
This is the part of Zeo that writes and ships code. Our senior engineers build agents, chatbots, and RAG pipelines, along with the automation and data work around them, and they keep operating those systems once they're live. We've worked with more than 500 brands since 2011.
Tools we use
Tools behind this work
LlamaIndexthe quick throwaway index the sampled corpus gets test-queried through
Chromathe lightweight local vector store the sample corpus gets indexed into for testing
Voyage AIthe embedding model isolating whether a retrieval failure is the corpus or the model
Ragasthe answerability score this page's readiness test is actually built around
Jupyterthe notebook making evidence transparency a rerunnable calculation, not a claim
Label Studiothe review interface turning a vague 'looks complete' worry into recorded specific failures
Adjacent work
Where this leads
Build
Enterprise RAG Development
Corpus readiness assessments identify and resolve OCR noise, formatting inconsistencies, and chunk fragmentation before production index generation.
Build
Access-Controlled RAG
Document audits map source metadata and file ownership, establishing the permission attributes embedded into retrieval security filters.
Assurance
RAG Evaluation & Groundedness Testing
Cleaned and structured document corpora provide the gold-standard source material required to design reliable factual evaluation benchmarks.
Next step
Decide what the corpus can support before you build
Before you decide