A practical guide for product leaders who want a working knowledge assistant prototype — without sinking three months in vendor demos.
Why 7 days?
The goal of a 7-day RAG pilot is not to build production software. It's to answer the highest-priority uncertainty: "Does this technology actually work with my data?" Speed is the point. Every day you spend scoping is a day of organizational doubt.
Day 1–2: Define the question, not the solution
Before touching a vector database, write down the three most common questions your users ask that take more than 5 minutes to answer. Those are your eval cases. Not personas, not journey maps — just questions.
Pick a single domain: a product FAQ, a compliance manual, or a set of internal SOPs.
Collect 20–50 documents from that domain. Not 500. Not your entire intranet.
Write 20 ground-truth Q&A pairs. You'll use these to measure accuracy objectively.
Day 3–4: Build the minimum RAG stack
You need four components: a document chunker, an embedding model, a vector store, and an LLM. Here is the minimal stack that has worked for every pilot we've shipped: