A RAG pilot cannot be judged by fluent answers alone. It needs a matrix: correct document found, citation valid, answer complete, unsupported claims absent, and latency acceptable.
RAG evaluation surveys separate retrieval, generation, groundedness, and end-to-end usefulness. Business pilots must translate those metrics into acceptance scenarios.
Knovium pilots need control questions, expected sources, failure logs, and a strict insufficient-evidence state.
The practical value of this article is that it turns a research topic into an implementation checklist. Before a pilot, the team can see which data is ready, which documents need preparation, where manual labeling is useful, and which risks should be closed before the model is connected.
It is important to separate source-supported facts from product conclusions. The sources describe methods, limits, and metrics; Knovium applies them to enterprise archives with access rights, scan quality, domain terms, response latency, and accountability for wrong conclusions.