A common instinct is to give AI systems access to everything—your entire document library, all your emails, the complete company wiki. The logic seems sound: more information should mean better answers.
The Challenge: Information overload degrades performance.
In practice, dumping too much information into an AI system creates three problems:
- Cost: You pay for every piece of data the system processes.
- Speed: More data means longer wait times for answers.
- Accuracy: Relevant information gets buried in noise, leading to worse—not better—answers.
Recommendation: Intelligent Retrieval.
We recommend treating data as a scarce resource. Build systems that retrieve only the specific pieces of information relevant to the user's current question. The result is a system that is faster, cheaper, and often more accurate than one that tries to "know everything."