Most broken RAG deployments are not model failures. They are upstream failures the model is forced to ventriloquize. The fix is a data pipeline that does the judgment work before retrieval — staleness gates, canonical resolution, business rules as first-class content.
60% of agentic projects stall on data, not models. A 30-minute, three-tier gate — Foundation, Workflow, Autonomous — that decides what autonomy your data can actually support, with a retrofit pattern for legacy systems you cannot rewrite.