In The Pocket: Eleonora Drykina & Nina Žižakić Discuss Building a Payments RAG Assistant

The AI Engineer channel published the video 'Your Fridge Is a Valid Payment Device' on October 14, 2026, presented by Eleonora Drykina and Nina Žižakić. They introduced a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) assistant built for an anonymous Belgian payments company. The core challenge was that the source material comprised about 270 PDF files and 6,000 pages, with much of the critical information located within complex tables.

According to the episode description, their indexing pipeline preserved section paths and chunk order to allow reconstruction of larger passages, while converting tables into CSV format retaining the relationship between headings and values. Combining dense retrieval with BM25 raised the reported retrieval hit rate from 92% to 97% on 63 questions, though this measures retrieval performance rather than complete answer correctness. The serving agent could widen its search through four tools, moving from search results to full documents and multiple rulebooks.

The speakers also discussed latency issues, noting a median answer time of 38 seconds, which made the interface part of the engineering problem. Streaming Markdown separately from a completed source card avoided waiting for one large structured object. Additionally, they explained traces, citation checks, and Promptfoo evaluations, along with early internal rollout reaching 34 users and roughly 900 questions. External release remained planned at the time.