Build multimodal RAG over 10,000 PowerPoint decks that answers chart queries and cites the exact slide.
Slides are the worst RAG corpus: text in shapes, meaning in charts, the message in the image. A query like 'the blue bar chart with Q3 revenue' fails if you embed only the extracted text, and citing the wrong slide number kills trust instantly.
Updated Aug 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Slides are the worst RAG corpus: text in shapes, meaning in charts, the message in the image. A query like 'the blue bar chart with Q3 revenue' fails if you embed only the extracted text, and citing the wrong slide number kills trust instantly.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.
