High-level, Chroma lets you incorporate your own data into AI. That can be business data, like your help docs, or customer data, such as private documents.

I think there's a misconception among many non-technical people that they should "fine tune" models - to make an LLM sound like their brand or know their internal data. But, the best practice today is "context engineering" - to use a commodity LLM, and add propriety information into the prompt.

The hard part of context engineering is knowing which data to incorporate. For example, all help docs in every context creates context rot [1] that hurts accuracy, so you need a way to find which information to put in which context. The solution is essentially an internal search engine, which is Chroma.

Chroma gives AI multiple ways to search, and you can either hard-code which one works best for you - or let an agent write its own queries to conduct research by itself. Vector search is a generation ahead of old search infrastructure, and is useful for relatedness queries - like "help docs about billing". Full-text search is useful for proper nouns, like "Next.js". Regex search is useful for code and laws. Metadata search is more nuanced, but becomes really important in document search (e.g., PDFs). Chroma lets you run all of these search methods against private data, and you can use it to even include citations in results.

So, the high-level answer is: Chroma enables you to incorporate your business or customer data into AI.

[1] https://research.trychroma.com/context-rot