Forget RAG Pipelines—Build Production Ready Agents in 15 Mins: Nina Lopatina, Rajiv Shah, Contextual
Jun 27, 2025 · 1:15:43
Rajiv Shah, Nina Lopatina, and Matthew from Contextual AI demonstrate how developers can build production-ready RAG agents in minutes using Contextual AI's managed RAG platform, emphasizing that RAG should be treated as a managed service to avoid reinventing infrastructure. They walk through ingesting documents like NVIDIA financials and spurious correlation reports, then querying the agent with questions requiring quantitative reasoning across tables. The platform handles extraction, layout analysis, image captioning, hybrid retrieval, and a state-of-the-art reranker, capped by a grounded language model that avoids hallucinations and provides attribution. Evaluation is done via LM Unit, a model-as-judge that scores responses on criteria like accuracy and causation. The episode also shows integrating the agent with Claude Desktop via MCP and answers audience questions on pricing (consumption-based with a $25 credit), scalability, entitlements, HIPAA, and domain-specific language.
