A hotel chain's internal HR assistant answers employee questions about benefits and scheduling policy, which the company revises several times a year. Leadership is deciding between connecting the assistant to the current policy documents versus fine-tuning the model on those documents. What is the strongest reason to prefer connecting it to the current documents?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Think about how often HR policy actually changes — a few times a year, unpredictably. Hooking the assistant up to the live policy documents means every answer reflects the latest rules the moment they're published, no retraining cycle required. That's the whole point of retrieval: your source of truth updates, and the assistant just follows along.
Full Explanation
Because HR policy changes several times a year, connecting the assistant to the current documents keeps answers accurate as policy evolves, without the recurring cost and delay of retraining the model every time content changes — the core tradeoff this question tests. The claim that document-connection is always cheaper than fine-tuning in every scenario overgeneralizes a scenario-specific advantage into a universal rule; relative cost actually depends on factors like update frequency and use case, and this exam expects case-by-case reasoning rather than absolutes. The claim that fine-tuning could never improve how an assistant answers policy questions is an overreach in the opposite direction — fine-tuning can be valuable for other needs, such as teaching an assistant a consistent tone, so dismissing it entirely is inaccurate. The idea that employees simply prefer citations over paraphrased summaries introduces an unsupported claim about employee preference that the scenario never mentions and isn't the actual business driver here. The generalizable takeaway: when content changes on a predictable cadence, favor approaches that reflect current source material over ones that require retraining to catch up. Operationally, ask whether the fix requires new weights or just a fresher document — that answer picks the technique.