Towards Trustworthy and Cost-Efficient Data Integration: From Naïve RAG to Agentic RAG

Large language models (LLMs) and AI agents have demonstrated strong potential for data integration in zero-shot and few-shot settings. However, they continue to face significant accuracy and cost challenges in enterprise environments due to a persistent knowledge gap. This paper envisions trustworthy, scalable, and cost-efficient integration through knowledge-grounded LLMs and agents operating within a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflow. Here, trustworthiness refers to evidence-grounded, verifiable reasoning, where integration decisions are transparently supported by retrieved knowledge, robust against hallucination, and consistent across tasks. We trace the evolution from classic RAG to GraphRAG and KG-RAG (knowledge graph-based RAG), highlighting how these paradigms bridge parametric and contextual knowledge. Building on this trajectory, we explore the shift toward Agentic RAG, where autonomous multi-agent systems adaptively plan, retrieve, refine, and reason for complex integration tasks. We examine optimization strategies for cost-efficient integration, addressing computational bottlenecks in large-scale enterprise settings. Finally, we outline open challenges and future directions toward building reliable, explainable, and scalable knowledge-grounded integration systems.

Data Intelligence Agents: Interpreting, Modeling, and Querying Enterprise Data via Autonomous Coding Agents

Production data integration is bottlenecked by repeated, lossy handoffs between data owners, engineers, and analysts who must collaboratively discover, structure, and query enterprise data. We present Data Intelligence Agents (DIA), a system of three agents (Data Interpreter, Schema Creator, and Query Generator) that compresses this workflow by treating autonomous coding agents (ACAs) as a first-class abstraction: rather than emitting text, the agents generate, execute, validate, and repair concrete artifacts, draw on a shared memory for experience reuse, and surface each for review by domain experts. DIA is deployed in production for enterprise customers. We study the Query Generator in depth and evaluate it in fully autonomous mode across seven SQL benchmarks spanning four task categories and four dialects. It matches or surpasses the best published results on all seven, demonstrating that an architecture grounded in execution, built on ACAs and a shared memory, generalizes across the data intelligence workload with adaptation confined to natural-language instructions.