AI Architecture Pattern Selector

Answer a few questions about your use case and get a recommended AI architecture pattern — RAG, GraphRAG, NL-to-SQL, Fine-Tuning, Agentic, or Hybrid — with trade-off analysis.

Your Use Case

Primary data type

Latency target

Auditability need

Regulatory sensitivity

Knowledge base size

Budget sensitivity

Additional requirements

Configure your requirements and click Select Pattern

Your recommended architecture pattern will appear here

All Architecture Patterns

RAG

Ground LLM answers in your own documents

Complexity: MediumCost: Medium

Internal knowledge bases · Document Q&A

GraphRAG

Traverse relationships, not just similarity

Complexity: Very HighCost: High

Research assistants · Biomedical / pharma

NL-to-SQL

Query your databases in plain English

Complexity: MediumCost: Low

Business intelligence · Analytics chatbots

Fine-Tuning

Bake domain knowledge into model weights

Complexity: HighCost: High

Classification / extraction at scale · Narrow-domain chat (legal, medical, code)

Agentic

Let the LLM plan, act, and loop

Complexity: Very HighCost: High

Autonomous research agents · Code generation and execution

Hybrid RAG

Best of both — docs and databases

Complexity: HighCost: Medium

Enterprise knowledge assistants · Platforms with both documents and databases

Architecture Selection Principles

  • Match pattern to data type first. Unstructured text → RAG family. Structured databases → NL-to-SQL. Mixed → Hybrid. Entity networks → GraphRAG.
  • Latency kills complexity. Real-time requirements rule out GraphRAG, Agentic, and most Hybrid approaches. Fine-tuning or cached RAG are the only paths to sub-500ms LLM responses.
  • Regulated decisions need deterministic audit trails. NL-to-SQL produces SQL. RAG produces cited chunks. Agentic produces reasoning traces — harder to audit. Fine-tuning produces nothing traceable.
  • Agentic is not a universal upgrade. Multi-step agent loops are expensive, slow, and hard to debug. Use them only when the task genuinely requires planning and tool composition.
  • Start with RAG, add complexity only when it fails. Most enterprise knowledge Q&A problems are solved well by RAG. Add a semantic layer, graph, or agent capability only when you can measure a specific gap.