Speaker Topics - No Fluff Just Stuff
NFJS2026

GraphRAG & Explainable AI: Building Trustworthy LLM Outputs

Most enterprise LLM failures aren’t technical — they’re trust failures. Models hallucinate, drift from source truth, or produce outputs with no provenance. For regulated industries, that’s unacceptable.
This session introduces GraphRAG — a breakthrough approach combining knowledge graphs (Neo4j) with retrieval-augmented generation to deliver traceable, explainable, and auditable AI outputs.
You’ll learn how to design, evaluate, and deploy GraphRAG architectures aligned with the EU AI Act, NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and enterprise AI governance standards.

Problems Solved

  • LLM answers without evidence or traceability
  • Stale or inconsistent retrieval data
  • Non-compliance with transparency and provenance regulations
  • Lack of explainability for model outputs
  • Low confidence from regulators, auditors, and executives

Why Now

  • Enterprise AI adoption slowed by lack of trust and explainability
  • Regulations (EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF) now require provenance and model transparency
  • Executives demand evidence-based reasoning, not black-box answers

What GraphRAG Is

  • Combines knowledge graphs (Neo4j) with retrieval-augmented generation
  • Returns answers with structured evidence paths — connecting entities → relationships → source documents → LLM response
  • Goes beyond flat vector search to capture contextual meaning, hierarchy, and causality

Where It Applies

  • Insurance: Claims approvals and denials with transparent justification
  • Healthcare: Patient summaries with provenance and compliance
  • Finance: Audit trails, credit-risk reasoning, regulatory reporting
  • Policy & Legal: Regulatory interpretation and case law summaries

Why It’s Valuable

  • Establishes trust with executives, auditors, and regulators
  • Improves faithfulness, groundedness, and transparency of model outputs
  • Reduces disputes, compliance risks, and hallucination-related rework
  • Creates structured AI reasoning pipelines aligned with governance frameworks

Agenda
Opening & Problem Context
Why trust is the bottleneck for enterprise AI.
Examples of LLMs failing in regulated use cases — what breaks when outputs lack provenance.
Pattern 1: Anatomy of GraphRAG
Understanding how GraphRAG extends RAG with Neo4j graphs.
Schema design for entities, relationships, and evidence paths.
Structured retrieval from graph → vector → generator.

Pattern 2: Architecture & Data Flow
End-to-end GraphRAG blueprint:
Ingestion → Entity extraction → Graph population → Retrieval orchestration → Response grounding.
Contrast with plain RAG and vector-only approaches.

Pattern 3: Explainability & Evaluation
Metrics for evaluating explainability:
Faithfulness, groundedness, and coverage.
How to trace model answers back to graph nodes and documents.
Integration with AI observability platforms (PromptLayer, Arize, etc.).

Pattern 4: Compliance & Governance Alignment
Connecting GraphRAG design to regulatory frameworks:

  • EU AI Act: Transparency, traceability, human oversight
  • NIST AI RMF: Trustworthiness and accountability
  • ISO 42001: AI Management Systems
Implementing provenance tags and explainability layers as compliance enablers.

Pattern 5: Real-World Scenarios
Industry case patterns:

  • “Why was this insurance claim denied?”
  • “Which regulation does this contract violate?”
  • “Which patient data contributed to this summary?”
Each example maps relationships, evidence, and trace paths through Neo4j.

Wrap-Up & Discussion
Recap of GraphRAG architecture and design patterns.
Checklist for adoption: schema templates, metrics, and governance integration.
Q/A and enterprise discussion on explainable AI roadmaps.

Key Framework References

  • Microsoft GraphRAG: Open-source structured hierarchical retrieval pattern
  • Neo4j Graph Data Science & LLM Integration Guide
  • EU AI Act & NIST AI RMF: Provenance, explainability, and risk transparency
  • ISO/IEC 42001: AI governance and management principles
  • Gartner & Forrester: Trust and transparency as core adoption barriers

Takeaways

  • GraphRAG design blueprint (schema + ingestion + retriever)
  • Evaluation metrics: faithfulness, groundedness, coverage
  • Reference architecture diagrams for Neo4j + RAG + LLM stack
  • Playbook for integrating explainability with compliance frameworks

Rohit Bhardwaj

About Rohit Bhardwaj

Rohit Bhardwaj is a Director of AI & Data Architecture at Salesforce, where he focuses on enterprise AI, agentic systems, cloud-native architecture, distributed systems, data platforms, security, and large-scale transformation.

Over his career, Rohit has designed and led complex enterprise platforms across AWS, Google Cloud, microservices, real-time data, API ecosystems, resilient distributed systems, and AI-enabled architectures. His work increasingly focuses on the challenges enterprises face as software evolves from deterministic services to AI-native and agentic systems—particularly around reliability, governance, evidence, security, observability, cost, and safe autonomy.

Rohit is the author of System Design with AI Interview Guide: Designing Scalable, Agentic, and Defensible Systems, published by Apress. The book presents a modern approach to system design covering scalability, distributed systems, AI architecture primitives, security, reliability, economics, agentic systems, and real-world architectures including e-commerce, ride sharing, payments, fraud detection, messaging, video streaming, file storage, and search. (Springer Link)

Book:
Amazon: https://a.co/d/09Zs1twa
Publisher / Springer Nature: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/979-8-8688-2782-2
O'Reilly: https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/system-design-with/9798868827822/ 

Rohit is also an O’Reilly instructor and a frequent speaker at technology conferences including No Fluff Just Stuff, UberConf, GIDS, and other international events. His talks focus on practical architecture lessons from building and operating complex systems, including AI control planes, trusted agents, inference at scale, evidence-first RAG, AI security, distributed-system failure, and AI-era software architecture.

As a trusted advisor and architecture leader, Rohit works at the intersection of business strategy and deep technical architecture—helping teams translate complex business problems into scalable, resilient, secure, and economically sustainable systems.

Rohit holds an MBA in Corporate Entrepreneurship from Babson College and graduate-level education in Computer Science from Boston University and Harvard University.

Connect with Rohit:
LinkedIn: http://linkedin.com/in/rohit-bhardwaj-cloud
X / Twitter: @rbhardwaj1

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