Humans are remarkably good at seeing structure. Show someone a folder containing: receipts inspection reports contracts photos of vehicles resumes …and within seconds they understand the shape of the data. A receipt has: a merchant a total a date A vehicle photo has: a brand a model a color An inspection report has: findings categories pass/fail states The structure is obvious. The problem is that most software systems cannot see it. The retrieval trap Most modern AI tooling approaches files through retrieval. Chunk documents. Embed chunks. Search by similarity. Feed chunks into an LLM. This works surprisingly well for retrieval questions: “find the contract mentioning GDPR” “show me the invoice from March” “summarize this document” But many real-world questions are not retrieval questions. They are aggregation questions. Examples: Which vehicles appear most frequently across this photo collection? How many reports failed safety checks? Which suppliers increased prices over time?…