I attended ElasticON recently where we spent the day with our NYC Elastic community, talking about the combined value of vector databases using retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to feed large language models (LLMs) for next-level generative AI (GenAI) results. Elastic’s CTO and Founder Shay Banon kicked off his keynote with an important message: GenAI is not magic.

In the digital era, state and local governments are increasingly tasked with managing vast volumes of data while ensuring compliance with stringent regulatory requirements. These regulations, which can vary significantly depending on jurisdiction, often require the retention of data for extended periods — sometimes ranging from one to seven years.