Authors:
Lorenz Brehme
1
;
Benedikt Dornauer
1
;
Thomas Ströhle
1
;
Maximilian Ehrhart
2
and
Ruth Breu
1
Affiliations:
1
University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
;
2
CASABLANCA Hotelsoftware, Schönwies, Austria
Keyword(s):
Retrieval Augmented Generation, Industrial Application, Interview Survey.
Abstract:
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a well-established and rapidly evolving field within AI that enhances the outputs of large language models by integrating relevant information retrieved from external knowledge sources. While industry adoption of RAG is now beginning, there is a significant lack of research on its practical application in industrial contexts. To address this gap, we conducted a semi-structured interview study with 13 industry practitioners to explore the current state of RAG adoption in real-world settings. Our study investigates how companies apply RAG in practice, providing (1) an overview of industry use cases, (2) a consolidated list of system requirements, (3) key challenges and lessons learned from practical experiences, and (4) an analysis of current industry evaluation methods. Our main findings show that current RAG applications are mostly limited to domain-specific QA tasks, with systems still in prototype stages; industry requirements focus primarily
on data protection, security, and quality, while issues such as ethics, bias, and scalability receive less attention; data preprocessing remains a key challenge, and system evaluation is predominantly conducted by humans rather than automated methods.
(More)