An illustrative walk-through. The cursor is the analyst. The amber particles are the data flowing up. The teal particles are the query flowing down. The answer at the end is the artefact your regulator accepts.
Without one, your model is guessing which Snowflake table has the customer record. A managed catalogue, crawled and classified every night, is the floor every other layer stands on.
A field called “cust_id” means nothing to a model. Bound to a typed customer entity, with relationships to claims, policies and reserves, it becomes something the agent can actually reason against.
Multi-hop questions ("which claims sit below benchmark and trigger reinsurance") need traversal, not retrieval. A vector store cannot do this. A typed, queryable graph can, and every step is auditable.
Every answer comes back with the reasoning trace, the citations and the audit log. The model becomes a tool that produces evidence, not just text. Your QA reviewer can audit. Your compliance officer can export.
Thirty minutes. No deck, no demo theatre. Bring your hardest stuck pilot.