Where standard RAG runs a fixed retrieve-then-generate pipeline, agentic RAG lets the model control retrieval, which suits multi-step or multi-source questions and lets the system know when it does not know. The trade-off is added latency and cost.
Glossary
Agentic RAG
Agentic RAG is retrieval-augmented generation restructured as a reasoning loop: an agent decides whether to retrieve, what to search for, which source to use, and whether the evidence is good enough — retrying or escalating when it is not.