Published April 6, 2026
Agentic RAG can deliver serious operational lift, but only if governance is treated as part of runtime design. This playbook outlines a production-safe baseline that balances autonomy with control.
Apply policy at three points: request intake, retrieval, and action execution. Each layer should be independently testable and versioned.
Use entitlement-aware retrieval, trust scoring, and freshness checks. If confidence drops below threshold, route to a constrained response mode instead of generating speculative outputs.
Classify actions by blast radius. Low-impact actions can run automatically; medium and high-impact actions should require additional policy checks and optional human approval.
Track policy hit rate, retrieval source quality, fallback frequency, and rollback events. These metrics reveal where governance is too loose or too restrictive.