Beyond Search: RAG’s Awakening to Enterprise Spreadsheets
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are fast becoming the connective tissue between Large Language Models (LLMs) and real-world business data. But while RAG systems excel at fetching relevant passages from documents, they often stumble when the data isn’t narrative but numerical. In enterprise environments, where structured formats like HR tables, policy records, or financial reports dominate, this mismatch has become a bottleneck. The paper “Advancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Structured Enterprise and Internal Data” by Chandana Cheerla proposes a much-needed upgrade: a RAG system that treats structured and tabular data as first-class citizens. It doesn’t just flatten tables into linear strings or hope LLMs can reason through semi-garbled inputs. It restructures the entire RAG pipeline to respect and preserve the meaning of tables, rows, and metadata. ...