Artificial Intelligence
03 Sep 2026
6 min read
Choose Between Prompting, RAG, and Fine-Tuning
When an AI application produces weak results, teams often jump directly to fine-tuning. That can be the right choice, but many problems are cheaper and easier to solve with better prompting or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The three approaches change different parts of the system. Prompting changes the instructions and context given at inference time. RAG supplies relevant external information at inference time. Fine-tuning changes the model’s learned parameters through additional training.