Retrieval-augmented generation
RAG development services that ground AI answers in your own documents
RAG development services build retrieval-augmented generation systems, which let a language model look up your company's documents and records before it answers, so the answer comes from your data instead of the model's general training. Safock builds the full pipeline for teams whose knowledge sits in PDFs, shared drives, email and databases: ingestion, chunking, search, access control, citations and testing. That pipeline then powers the chatbot, assistant or agent your team uses every day.
/ The problem
What this fixes
- 01
A general model knows nothing about your business
Your policies, prices, contracts and SOPs were never in its training data, so it guesses. A confident guess about your own business does more harm than no answer.
- 02
Knowledge buried in files nobody can search
The answer exists somewhere in a shared drive, an old email thread or a PDF manual, but finding it takes longer than asking the one person who remembers.
- 03
No way to check where an answer came from
If an assistant cannot show the paragraph or record behind its answer, nobody can trust it for anything that matters.
- 04
Everyone seeing everything
A search index that ignores permissions lets a junior employee read the board pack. Access rules have to travel with the data.
/ What we build
RAG development, built for your systems
- 01
Document and data ingestion
Connectors for PDFs, Word, spreadsheets, email, wikis and databases, with scheduled syncs so the index stays current as files change.
- 02
Search that finds the right passage
Chunking, embeddings and hybrid keyword plus semantic search, tuned on your real questions rather than a demo set.
- 03
Citations on every answer
Each answer links back to the document, page or record it came from, so a reader can check it in one click.
- 04
Permission-aware retrieval
Retrieval filters by the asker's role or department, so people only get answers built from data they are allowed to see.
- 05
Evaluation and monitoring
Test sets of real questions with expected sources, plus logs of what was retrieved and answered once the system is live.
/ How it works
The detail behind it
How a RAG system works
When someone asks a question, the system first searches your indexed content for the passages most likely to contain the answer. Those passages go to the language model together with the question, and the model writes an answer using only that material, with a citation for each claim.
The same pipeline can power a RAG chatbot on your website, an internal assistant for staff, or an agent that acts on what it finds. If the search finds nothing relevant, a well-built RAG system says so. 'I can't find this in your data' is a correct answer, and we design and test for it.
Cited answers in production, as Mavick runs them
Mavick, our AI operating system for textile factories, gives every department its own agent that answers from that department's documents and live ERP data. Each citation shows the source and when the figure was fetched from the ERP. A member who opens another department's workspace gets a page-not-found response, and the attempt is written to the activity trail.
We bring the same pattern to client builds. Retrieval is scoped by permission, every answer carries its sources, and the system says plainly when the data does not contain the answer.
How we test retrieval before launch
We build a test set from questions your team actually asks, each paired with the document or record that holds the answer. Two scores matter. The first is whether search returned the right source. The second is whether the answer stayed faithful to that source and added nothing it does not say.
The set runs before launch and again whenever the chunking, the embedding model or the language model changes. A change that looks harmless, such as a new model version, cannot lower answer quality without the scores showing it.
- Questions taken from real tickets, emails and staff requests
- Expected source documents for each question
- Questions the data cannot answer, to check the system refuses them
- Questions asked by different roles, to check permissions hold
What drives the cost of RAG development services
Cost depends on how many sources you connect, how messy the content is (scanned PDFs and spreadsheets take more work than clean text), how strict the access rules are, and where the system must run. A single document library behind a chat interface is a much smaller project than a permission-aware index across five systems.
We scope this during discovery and give a fixed price for the build. Running cost depends on volume and the model you choose, and we keep it down with caching and smaller models for simple steps.
- Number and type of data sources
- State of the content: clean text, scans, spreadsheets
- Access rules and who may see what
- Where it runs: our cloud, yours, or on premises
/ How we work
From first call to a system your team runs
- 01
Discovery
We start with your workflows, goals, and constraints, so we solve the problem you actually have.
- 02
Proposal & architecture
A clear scope, timeline, milestones, and system design, with honest pricing before any build starts.
- 03
Agile delivery
Short sprints with regular demos, so you see working software early and can steer as it takes shape.
- 04
Launch
Deployment, optimization, and security hardening are included. Nothing ships unless it is safe and secure.
- 05
Support & growth
30 days to 3+ months of support after launch, with long-term maintenance available as you grow.
- 06
Your team, enabled
Documentation and training so your people can operate and extend the system on their own.
/ Proof
Work that shows how we build
/ FAQ
Questions buyers ask us
What is RAG in simple terms?
Retrieval-augmented generation means the AI looks things up in your documents and data before it answers, then answers from what it found and shows you the source. A plain language model answers from its training data, which has never seen your contracts, prices or procedures. RAG supplies that knowledge at question time without retraining the model, so an updated policy changes the answer the same day it is indexed.
Do you need to train a model on our data?
Usually not. RAG keeps your data in a search index and passes the relevant passages to the model at question time, so you can update the data any day without retraining anything. Fine-tuning changes how a model writes or classifies, and it suits narrow, repetitive tasks with many labelled examples. If your project is one of those cases, we will say so during discovery and explain the extra cost.
Can the system respect who may see what?
Yes. Each passage in the index keeps the access rules of the document it came from, and retrieval filters by the asker's role, department or group before anything reaches the model. A person only gets answers built from content they could open themselves. In Mavick, a department's agent cannot read another department's data, and any attempt to open another department's workspace is logged.
Can it run without our data leaving our servers?
Yes. The index, the ingestion jobs and an open-weight language model can all run on your own servers or in a private cloud account, so documents never reach an outside AI provider. The trade-off is cost and quality: open-weight models need GPU hosting, and many of the strongest models are only offered through their providers' APIs. We compare both options on your own test questions during discovery.
What does a RAG system cost to run each month?
Running cost has three parts: turning documents into embeddings when they are added or changed, storing the search index, and the language model's charge for each question. Volume drives the last part most, so a staff assistant answering a few hundred questions a day costs far less than a public chatbot. We cut it with caching and smaller models for simple questions, and estimate it from your expected volume in discovery.
/ Related
Often paired with
- /01AI agent development
AI agents
Custom AI agents that read your data, use your tools, and ask a person before they change anything.
- Task agents
- Department agents
- Retrieval over company data
- /02AI chatbot development
AI chatbot development
Custom AI chatbots for your website, WhatsApp, Slack or Teams that answer from your documents and show their sources.
- Website support chatbot
- Internal knowledge assistant
- WhatsApp chatbot
- /03AI automation services
AI automation
Find the work worth automating, then build agents, workflows and integrations that do it inside your existing systems.
- Automation audit and roadmap
- AI agents for multi-step tasks
- Workflow automation
- /04Systems integration and API development
Systems integration
We connect payments, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, ERPs and CRMs with APIs and webhooks that stay correct under real traffic.
- Payment gateway integration
- Google Workspace and Microsoft 365
- ERP and CRM connections
/ Next step
Tell us which documents your team searches the most
Tell us what you are working on. You will speak with a founder, and you will leave the call with a clear next step, even if that step is not us.
Prefer writing? Send us a brief and a founder will reply.

