Free Lesson

Your Agents Are Only As Good As Your Retrieval

Part of Context Camp

60 min
Aug 5, 2026 9:00 AM
Virtual (Zoom)

In this video

What you'll learn

Why agent failures often begin with retrieval

Trace confident agent mistakes back to the documents, tools, and evidence the system found—or failed to find.

How autonomy raises the cost of bad relevance

See why retrieval errors become more dangerous as agents take action instead of simply returning an answer.

What to evaluate before improving orchestration

Learn where to inspect retrieval quality before adding more tools, workflows, prompts, or agent complexity.

Why this topic matters

Agents can only reason over what they retrieve. As systems gain more autonomy—and MCP gives them access to more tools and sources—a weak relevance layer can turn one bad result into a confident, consequential action. Before investing in orchestration, teams need to know whether their agents are finding the right evidence in the first place.

You'll learn from

Atita Arora

Atita Arora

Search & AI Strategist — formerly Voyager Search, Qdrant, OSC, Lucidworks

Doug Turnbull (Maven)

Doug Turnbull (Maven)

Led teams at Shopify, Reddit, Wikipedia

Hugo Bowne Anderson

Hugo Bowne Anderson

AI & data engineer, consultant, educator of 6+ million students

Previously At

Voyager Search
Shopify.com
Reddit
OpenSource Connections
Qdrant
See all products from Doug