Data provenance

• Handling regulated data or customer-specific corpora in RAG.
• Preparing for audits, SOC2 renewals, or enterprise security reviews.
• Investigating hallucinations or bias introduced by stale content.

Provenance underpins trust and compliance. PMs must ensure every piece of content has ownership, freshness, and permission metadata. Missing provenance raises legal risk and slows sales cycles. Strong provenance also speeds debugging when answers go wrong.

Require source, owner, last-reviewed date, and access scope on every indexed item. Automate checks during ingestion. In 2026, attach provenance to responses (hidden or user-facing) and feed it into evals to catch stale or unauthorized sources early.

A B2B copilot annotates each chunk with owner and last-reviewed date. During a SOC2 audit, the team proves that no response used content older than 90 days for a critical policy, avoiding remediation work and keeping a six-figure deal on track.

• Indexing data without permission metadata, risking cross-tenant leakage.
• Letting last-reviewed dates drift, leading to stale or incorrect answers.
• Not surfacing provenance in logs, slowing incident investigations.