What specifically does Agentic RAG add on top of traditional RAG?
Traditional RAG retrieves once, in a fixed way, and generates an answer. Agentic RAG wraps that retrieval step in a reasoning agent that decides what to retrieve, chooses between multiple tools or data sources, can issue more than one retrieval round if the first pass wasn't sufficient, and can refine its own query based on what came back — turning a fixed pipeline into an adaptive loop.
Answered in
RAG vs Agentic RAG: Why Retrieval Needed to Become a DecisionTraditional RAG retrieves once and answers. Agentic RAG lets the system decide what to retrieve, from where, and whether the first answer was even good enough.
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