Text-only RAG was the big thing in 2024.

In 2026, if your RAG system can't handle images, tables, and charts alongside text, you're leaving massive value on the table.

Think about what real business documents look like. Technical manuals with diagrams. Financial reports with charts. Medical records with scans. Product catalogs with images. None of these are text-only, so why should your retrieval system be?

Multimodal RAG architecture: embed documents across modalities using CLIP or ColPali. Store everything in a vector database. Retrieve relevant chunks — whether they're text, images, or tables. Feed them to a vision-language model. Get comprehensive answers that draw from all modalities.

I built a multimodal RAG system over an engineering manual. Users could ask "show me the wiring diagram for section 4" and get the actual diagram with a text explanation. The previous text-only system could only say "refer to figure 4.3."

The user reaction was immediate: "This is actually useful now."

Very few engineers know how to build this properly. The documentation is sparse, the patterns are still emerging, and it requires understanding both vision models and retrieval systems.

That's exactly what makes it a great specialization right now.