# Pinecone Nexus

You point Nexus at your sources and curate them into a context. Agents then query that context with a single call and get back a structured, grounded answer with citations, instead of re-assembling context from raw chunks on every request.

Traditional RAG hands an agent ranked chunks and leaves it to search, stitch, and re-search. Nexus does that work once, upstream, so agents spend their budget on reasoning instead of re-orienting.

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:::card{title="Quickstart" href="/guides/get-started-nexus-quickstart" icon="rocket"}
Prepare your first context, then query it.
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:::card{title="Key concepts" href="/guides/get-started-nexus-concepts" icon="book"}
Contexts, manifests, artifacts, sessions, and the Query API.
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:::card{title="How Nexus works" href="/guides/the-knowledge-engine-how-it-works" icon="lightbulb"}
Curated artifacts for retrieval, then answers composed over a retrieval SDK.
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:::card{title="Bring Your Own Cloud" href="/guides/bring-your-own-cloud-overview" icon="cloud"}
Deploy Nexus in your own cloud account.
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## What you can do

- **Turn raw sources into queryable knowledge.** Upload documents or connect a data source, then curate them into a searchable context. There is no chunking pipeline or eval set to hand-build.
- **Ask in one call.** Agents issue a KnowQL query (`ask` plus `scope`, optionally a typed `shape`) and get back a grounded, cited answer. One query is a turn. Multi-turn conversations are sessions.
- **Compose across domains.** A single query can span multiple contexts, so knowledge is a graph of contexts rather than one monolithic index.
- **Keep answers grounded and scoped.** Answers carry citations, and access is scoped to your Pinecone project.

## Why Nexus

The most expensive part of an agent is not reasoning. It is knowledge acquisition. Agents built on raw retrieval burn tokens re-orienting on every call and loop through retrieve, evaluate, and re-retrieve cycles. Nexus compiles the knowledge once and serves it on every call:

- **Cheaper than agentic RAG.** The expensive work happens once at curation time, not per query, so agents spend far fewer tokens.
- **Faster than a retrieval loop.** A single query replaces the multi-step retrieve, evaluate, and re-retrieve cycle.
- **Trusted, grounded answers.** Each one carries citations and is scoped to your Pinecone project, running on the Pinecone Database underneath.

## What Nexus is not

- **Not a vector database.** The Pinecone Database sits _underneath_ Nexus as the retrieval substrate. Nexus is the engine layer above it.
- **Not RAG.** RAG returns ranked chunks for a human to read. Nexus compiles typed, grounded artifacts purpose-built for agents and returns answers.
- **Not an agent framework.** Nexus is knowledge infrastructure: query in, answer out. Your agent decides what to do with the answer.

## Related pages

- [Account management](./account-management-index.md)
- [Admin](./admin-2-index.md)
- [Admin](./admin-index.md)
- [APIs](./apis-index.md)
- [Architecture](./architecture-index.md)
- [Assistants](./assistants-index.md)
- [Bring Your Own Cloud](./bring-your-own-cloud-index.md)
- [Build an assistant](./build-an-assistant-index.md)
- [Build an integration](./build-an-integration-index.md)
- [Changelog](./changelog-index.md)

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