The three things structure provides
- Identity — this specific customer, this specific job, every time.
- Relationship — this invoice belongs to this job, which belongs to this customer.
- State — where this job is in the process right now.
Why documents are not enough
Search over documents can retrieve passages, which is useful for policies and manuals. It cannot reliably answer 'how many jobs are unscheduled this week' — that requires a query against structured records, not similarity over text.
The rule worth enforcing: counts and totals must come from queries, never from a model's own recollection.
Data quality is the ceiling
AI performance in a business is bounded above by the quality of the record. Improving structure raises the ceiling for every AI feature at once, which is why it outperforms swapping models.