Ramp migrates customer industry classification to a RAG-powered NAICS system
Ramp's industry classification relied on a homegrown taxonomy stitched together from third-party data, sales-entered data, and customer self-reporting, producing multiple non-auditable sources of truth that forced many-to-many translation layers and made cross-team alignment and external partner communication difficult.
How it works
Common implementation structure
How this type of workflow is generally built, generalized across documented cases — not tied to any one vendor's stack. Click any stage to read what happens there. Specific products that implement these stages appear in “Tools commonly seen” below.
Stage 1 · Business embedding generation
Internal services handle embeddings for new businesses entering the classification pipeline.
Tools used
RAGClickhouseKafkaLLM
Outcome
Migrating to the RAG-based NAICS system increased classification accuracy and gave Ramp's teams a consistent, auditable system with full control over updates and costs, described by stakeholders as significantly upgrading data quality and understanding of customers.
What failed first
The Homegrown system had documented issues including overly broad and inconsistent categorizations, mandatory many-to-many mappings to external standards, and classifications insufficiently nuanced to satisfy compliance requirements.