There's been a lot of talk about "context engineering" in 2026 i.e. giving AI access to documents and information. But what does it mean when an AI system "finds a document"? For you to fully understand whether one AI "finds documents" better than another, you first need to understand how it works. The retriever is not the LLM This is the first thing to get clear, because the conflation is almost universal. When an AI assistant searches your Sharepoint, your knowledge base, o