Multimodal RAG: Architecture, Tradeoffs, and What Actually Works in Production

This article assumes you already know what RAG is, why naive RAG breaks at scale, and what chunking, embedding, and retrieval mean. We skip the basics. The Problem with Text-Only RAG at Scale Standard RAG pipelines assume your knowledge base is text. That assumption holds until you’re working with enterprise data - and enterprise data is almost never purely text. It’s scanned PDFs with tables, slide decks with charts, audio meeting recordings, product images, and structured CSVs that live alongside unstructured docs.