Agentic RAG When to Go Agentic | Signal | Static RAG | Agentic RAG | |---|---|---| | Known single-hop questions | Yes | No | | Unknown retrieval depth | No | Yes | | Multi-source (docs + web + DB) | No | Yes | | Need to detect retrieval failure and recover | No | Yes | | Latency budget < 2s | Yes | No | | Audit trail / explainability | Harder | Natural | Agentic adds latency and cost; use when static cannot recover from retrieval failure or needs multiple steps. ReAct with Retrieval Tool Agent decides when and what to search; handles multi-hop automatically via tool-loop. Self-RAG (self-refle…