AutoRAG for prospect attachments: from file drop to AI-readable
AutoRAG for prospect attachments converts each file that arrives from a lead into AI-readable passages on ingest - including transcription for recordings - so sales AI answers from what they sent, not from a blank activity feed.
Prospects send files, not fields
A serious opportunity arrives as a deck, an RFP PDF, a security questionnaire, a voice memo, sometimes a screen recording. The CRM captures the contact. The content sits in an attachment list nobody searches. AutoRAG on that drop means convert runs when the file is stored: parse or transcribe, chunk, embed, attach the account id in metadata. The next question from a rep or an agent already has something to retrieve.
Transcription is part of convert, not a side quest
Call recordings and voice notes are unsearchable until they are text with timings. Deploying AutoRAG for prospect attachments usually means the same pipeline that handles PDFs also runs speech on audio - one job, one JSONL out, one place to load. Separate "we'll transcribe later" queues are how recordings rot while the deal moves on without them.
What we deploy in practice
The pattern is simple enough to run unattended: CRM or inbox webhook fires on a new prospect attachment; a worker calls the conversion API with the file and the engines that fit (parse for documents, ASR for audio, OCR when the PDF is a scan); the response JSONL lands in the retrieval store keyed to the lead. RAG Converter is that convert step - the same artifact a human would download from the browser, produced for every inbound file without a person in the loop.
Failure modes worth naming
Corrupt uploads, empty text layers, unsupported codecs. A good convert returns the rest of the batch and names the skip. Indexing a blank placeholder for a failed scan is worse than skipping - it pollutes retrieval. Surface skips next to the CRM activity so ops can re-request a text-layer PDF or a cleaner recording.
What the AI is allowed to claim
After convert, answers should cite the attachment. "They asked for SOC 2 in the security questionnaire" with a source beats a model inventing compliance language. If the file never converted, the honest answer is that the attachment is not in the corpus yet - not a confident guess from training data dressed as CRM insight.