RAG Chatbot Development for B2B: Why We Stopped Hard-Coding One LLM Vendor

Short summary

When Anthropic's Claude went unavailable for 20 days in June due to export controls, B2B RAG systems built on single-vendor APIs went dark. The fix: abstract the LLM layer with a thin provider interface so swapping vendors is a config change, not a rebuild. When evaluating RAG agencies, ask if they can switch models without rewriting retrieval logic—if not, you're buying a demo, not a resilient system.

• •Export control outage exposed vendor lock-in risk in production RAG systems
• •Use provider abstraction pattern to decouple LLM vendor from retrieval pipeline
• •Evaluate RAG vendors on failure-mode resilience, not just demo accuracy

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.