The Pulse
Progress Adds a Smart Agent to Its Enterprise RAG Platform
Progress added a Smart Agent, a Microsoft Teams app and a WordPress plugin to its Agentic RAG platform. The agent can split questions into steps and retrieve information from indexed content, connected business systems and the web.
AI.info Team · Written with AI ·
“The next phase of enterprise AI will not be defined by systems that simply retrieve information. It will be defined by AI that can navigate complex questions, work across organizational knowledge and deliver answers where people already work,”
John Ainsworth, EVP and General Manager, Application and Data Platform, Progress Software
Progress added a Smart Agent, a Microsoft Teams application and a WordPress plugin to its Agentic RAG platform in a release announced October 1. The company says the additions extend retrieval across indexed company material, live business systems and web sources, while allowing existing customers to keep their current deployments. Its October 2 follow-up described the Smart Agent’s built-in web-search feature in more detail.
Smart Agent breaks questions into retrieval steps
The Smart Agent plans a query, splits it into sub-questions, selects sources and checks whether it has gathered enough information to answer. Progress says it can search a Knowledge Box—a repository of indexed content—as well as applications connected through the Model Context Protocol, or MCP. The company says this approach is intended to reduce the need for teams to build and maintain their own source-routing and orchestration logic.
Unlike a system limited to pre-indexed documents, the agent can request live records from MCP-connected business applications when a question arrives. That could let one response draw on a CRM record, a support ticket and a document already in the knowledge base. Progress says the platform can also retrieve from the open web; its October 2 blog names Perplexity and Google Gemini as the services backing the built-in web-search tool.
Teams and WordPress extend the same platform
The Microsoft Teams app, distributed through the Microsoft Store, brings the platform’s source-cited answers into chats and channels. Progress says it retains existing permissions and governance controls, putting the answers inside a collaboration tool employees already use. The company presents this as a way to make its AI available in daily workflows without requiring a separate interface.
The WordPress plugin focuses on content ingestion rather than a new place to ask questions. Progress says the plugin preserves structure, metadata and taxonomy information while giving administrators more control over indexing and refreshes. The company says existing customers receive all three capabilities without reindexing, rebuilding pipelines or changing their architecture.
More retrieval choices, more to govern
Progress says quality scoring runs at each step and that source citations and audit logs let reviewers trace how an answer was assembled. Those controls matter more when an agent chooses its own next source, rather than returning results from one fixed search. The company’s announcement, however, does not provide independent performance measurements or a comparison showing how the Smart Agent affects answer accuracy.
The release shifts some integration work from custom application code into the platform, but it does not remove the need to configure access to company systems. Teams evaluating the feature will still need to determine which MCP-connected sources the agent can query and how those permissions fit their existing controls. Progress announced the release as available on October 1; its concrete change is that the same Agentic RAG deployment can now combine its indexed material with live connected sources and deliver answers in Teams.