How to Perform Agentic Information Retrieval

Agentic information retrieval utilizes AI agents to find information within a large collection of documents. The process builds upon foundational techniques like keyword search and the more modern Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which finds semantically similar content. Implementation can be done by building a custom system using embedding models and vector databases, or by leveraging simpler managed RAG services from providers like OpenAI. The most advanced approach involves providing these search capabilities as tools to an LLM, empowering the agent to autonomously decide when to search and refine its queries to gather sufficient information.