Cutting RAG inference costs 6x starts with deciding what never reaches the LLM

Cutting RAG inference costs 6x starts with deciding what never reaches the LLM

Most teams building retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems for high stakes classification make the same architectural bet: Route every ambiguous case straight to the language model and trust the retrieved context to sort it out. This works fine in a demo. It falls apart the moment the system has to survive an audit, a regulator, or a compliance officer asking why a specific decision was made six months ago.I have spent the last year buildi…