Smart Agent Is Here: Retrieval That Plans, Verifies, and Reaches Beyond Your Knowledge

Progress Agentic RAG's latest release introduces Smart Agent, an agentic retrieval capability that turns your knowledge layer into something that can reason across sources instead of just returning the nearest match. Rather than treating every question as a single lookup, Smart Agent breaks complex questions into sub-questions, decides where each one is best answered, checks whether what it found is actually enough, and keeps going until it is. It's available now as part of the same platform your teams already have configured — no new pipeline, no re-indexing.

Two things make this release worth paying attention to beyond the core capability: Smart Agent can now reach into the business applications your teams already run via MCP, and it ships with a built-in web search tool for pulling in information that lives outside anything you've indexed.

Querying the systems you already run, not just the ones you've indexed

Most of what an organization knows doesn't live in a document. It lives in a CRM, a support desk, a ticketing system — structured records that change by the hour. The Progress Agentic RAG Smart Agent connects to these through MCP, so it can pull live data from the same business applications your teams already depend on and combine it with whatever's sitting in your Knowledge Boxes.

A few ways that plays out in practice:

A support team using Zendesk could let Smart Agent answer "has this customer reported this issue before, and what resolved it?" by pulling open and historical tickets from Zendesk and cross-referencing them against product documentation and known-issue write-ups in the knowledge layer turning a search that used to require jumping between two systems into a single answer with both sources cited.

A sales or account team running Salesforce could ask a question like "what's the status of this renewal and has legal flagged anything?" and get back an answer that combines live opportunity and account data pulled from Salesforce with unstructured context — contract language, prior correspondence, meeting notes — that never made it into any CRM field to begin with.

A field service or IT operations team connected to a system like ServiceNow could have Smart Agent correlate an open incident with equipment history, prior resolutions, and a technical manual, producing a diagnosis with its sources attached instead of routing the question to whichever person happens to remember a similar case.

The pattern underneath all of these is the same: Smart Agent doesn't require you to have already pulled everything into your knowledge layer. It reaches out to the system of record at query time, through MCP servers you've likely already deployed for other purposes, so the connectors your team built keep paying off.

Reaching past your own walls with the new web search tool

Not every answer lives inside an organization's own content, and until now, extending Progress Agentic RAG's retrieval to the open web meant stepping outside the platform entirely. Smart Agent now includes a built-in web search tool — currently backed by Perplexity and Google Gemini — that can call as one more source alongside your Knowledge Box and connected business systems, and weigh in the same evaluate-and-iterate loop as everything else.

Practically, that opens up answers that combine internal and external context in a single response: a product team could ask a question that requires both an internal spec and current information about a competing product's public pricing; a compliance team could check an internal policy document against a regulation that changed last month; a research group could combine an internal report with a recent external finding it never had reason to index. In each case, Smart Agent decides for itself when the answer needs to leave your own content and reach the open web and still comes back with citations either way.

Together, these two additions are what make Smart Agent something closer to a general reasoning layer over everything your organization touches, rather than a smarter way to search documents you already indexed.

Learn more about the Smart Agent in Progress Agentic RAG today.