Start With Context: Building the Retrieval Core for Agentic Apps

Before you add planners, crews, or graph-shaped orchestration, build the part that decides what the model should actually see. In this first post, we’ll start an enterprise copilot and give it the one capability every future agent depends on: retrieval that doesn’t fall apart in production. In a recent post I made the case that MongoDB can serve as the "brain" of a modern AI application by combining durable state, retrieval, and application data in one place. That framing still holds, but brains are only useful if they can recall the right thing at the right time.