What the interviewer is testing

Whether you can distinguish agentic retrieval from a fixed pipeline and explain its benefits, costs, and production controls.

Answer framework

Agentic RAG replaces one fixed retrieve-then-generate pass with a model-controlled retrieval loop.

The model decides when and what to search and can issue several queries during that loop.

It reads the returned results and may search again when it still needs evidence.

This supports multi-hop questions, but it can increase cost and make evaluation harder.

Cap the number of steps and log each retrieval so the decision path can be inspected.

Sample answer

I would define agentic RAG as a retrieval-augmented generation system where the model controls part of the retrieval loop. In a basic RAG pipeline, I rewrite a query once, retrieve documents, and pass them to the model.…