Knowledge base

What is a knowledge base?

Before AI, a knowledge base was the internal wiki or the help centre on the website: the place where answers were written down. With AI agents it has taken on a new role. It’s the source the agent draws on for what it tells your customers.

A language model knows a lot about everything, but nothing about your business. It doesn’t know your delivery time to the Channel Islands or whether you open on bank holiday Monday. The knowledge base gives it that information. And what isn’t there, the agent shouldn’t make up.

How it works

1. Gather. Collect what customers ask about: website, FAQs, terms, opening hours, product sheets.
2. Organise. One idea per section, with no contradictions between documents. If two PDFs give different lead times, the agent may quote the wrong one.
3. Index. The system splits the documents into chunks and prepares them for search by meaning, usually with embeddings.
4. Look up. For each question, the agent finds the useful passages and answers from them. That’s the RAG technique.
5. Maintain. Review the questions that went unanswered and fill the gaps.

Anchoring answers to your documents in this way is called grounding. It’s the difference between an assistant that sounds right and one that says what your business would say.

Example

A phone repair shop in Dublin handles customers on WhatsApp. The same questions keep coming: how long a screen replacement takes, whether they have the battery for a given model, whether there’s a guarantee. The shop puts together one document with turnaround times by repair type, the guarantee, opening hours and how to post a phone in.

The agent answers those questions at any hour. When someone asks about a model that isn’t on the list, it doesn’t quote a price: it notes the model and the contact details and alerts the shop. At the end of the month, the shop adds the models people asked about most.

Knowledge bases at UTIO

At UTIO, the knowledge base is the documentation you load, and in the support vertical it’s the only source of answers: anything not in it doesn’t get answered. The agent takes a note and opens a ticket in the CRM with the details already captured, so your team picks it up with the groundwork done.

To get started, Creator builds the agent by reading your website, in one minute. It works with the WhatsApp agent and the voice agent, and the agent’s memory and the CRM are stored in Spain.