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Glossary

What is a knowledge base? The junk drawer, sorted

A knowledge base is the place where a company keeps what it knows, sorted by topic so anyone can find it: what it sells, to whom, on what terms and how it talks about it. If you looked up “what is a knowledge base” because you want to build your own, chances are you already have one, jumbled in a junk drawer.

What is a knowledge base? An example

Six people work at Lark & Loupe, a jewelry studio in Tucson. The repair price list is a PDF, the warranty is a loose sheet of paper, and the way to answer a complaint lives in an email from two years ago. All of it exists. What’s missing is one place, with each thing filed under its topic. Building the knowledge base means sorting that junk drawer, not writing it from scratch.

Internal knowledge base vs. customer help center

In the US the term usually brings to mind the public kind first: a help center with FAQs and how-to articles for customers. The internal kind is for the team: a new hire finds the fact without interrupting anyone. Both draw on the same material, but they don’t carry the same things. Margins, or the rule for when a discount is allowed, stay inside.

What goes in it: five essential topics

  1. What you do and for whom.
  2. Who your typical customer is.
  3. Which products or services you sell.
  4. How you talk.
  5. What can’t be said.

With those five, nearly any work question has somewhere to come from. Prices, FAQs and visual identity come later.

How to create a knowledge base, step by step

  1. Gather what already exists. PDFs, spreadsheets, emails, the website.
  2. Sort it by topic, not by folder or by date.
  3. Write down what only lives in someone’s head.
  4. Give it an owner and a review date. A knowledge base with no owner goes stale.

What is a knowledge base in AI?

The same thing, with a different reader. A classic knowledge base needs people to go in and search, and almost nobody does. With an AI assistant that has read it, you ask, and it answers with the document in front of it; the technique is called RAG. Order still matters: if the current price list and the old one sit side by side, it may quote the old one. The guide to setting up an internal chatbot with your documents covers the whole thing.

Sort it yourself

From the junk drawer to the blocks

Eight papers from the Lark & Loupe studio, the way they were: mixed up. Pick one and file it in its drawer. Mouse or keyboard, either works.

  • The company

    • About usWhat you do and for whom
    • Profile of our best customerTypical customer
    • CoveredWhat you do and for whom · Typical customer
    • MissingTeam and who decides

  • What you sell

    • Repair price listPrices and terms
    • Product page: the Juniper ringProducts or services
    • CoveredProducts or services · Prices and terms
    • MissingFAQs

  • Brand

    • Email: how we answer a complaintHow you talk
    • Logo guidelinesVisual identity
    • CoveredHow you talk · Visual identity
    • MissingContent samples

  • Limits and legal

    • Note: we never say “solid gold”What can’t be said
    • Warranty termsLegal notices and terms
    • CoveredWhat can’t be said · Legal notices and terms
    • CompleteNo topic is missing.

The papers are the same. Now each one answers a topic, and you can see which topics are missing.

There are four drawers here. A complete knowledge base has more: market, measurement, a record of decisions.

How it looks in Flipa

Topic by topic: what it knows and what it’s missing

Flipa reads your documents and your website and checks, topic by topic, what’s covered and what isn’t. There are ten blocks and 32 topics, the same for every company, and the five essentials are the ones in the list above. The drafts it writes from your website are yours to review: only what you approve is saved. The details are in knowledge. The app’s interface is in Spanish today, so that’s what the animation shows.

  • It reads PDF, Word, spreadsheets, presentations and public websites.
  • A topic that doesn’t apply to you can be set aside.
  • What it’s asked and doesn’t know gets noted.
The knowledge page: the meter with its percentage, each block’s progress, what to do next and, topic by topic, what it knows well, a little or not at all (app interface shown in Spanish).
FAQ

Before you start sorting

What is a knowledge base?

The place where an organization gathers, by topic, the information it needs to do its work: what it offers, to whom and on what terms. It can be a set of documents, a wiki or a dedicated program. What defines it is that you can look things up in it, not the format.

How do you create a knowledge base from scratch?

You almost never start from scratch. You gather what’s already there, sort it by topic, write down what only one person knows and name someone to maintain it. There’s more detail in the guide to training AI on your own data.

What are some knowledge base examples for a small business?

At a minimum: what you do, who buys from you, what you sell, the tone you use and what’s off limits. After that come prices and terms, FAQs, visual identity and legal notices.

What’s the difference between a knowledge base and a document management system?

A document management system stores files and tracks versions and permissions. A knowledge base stores answers: what matters is finding the fact, not the file. A company can have both, and the second usually feeds on the first.

Keep going

Knowledge in Flipa

How it measures what it knows about your company and what’s missing.

Guide: train AI on your own data

The ways an AI can learn about your company, compared.

Guide: internal chatbot

From loose files to an assistant the team asks.

Glossary: RAG

How an AI checks a knowledge base before answering.

Your knowledge base already exists

  • You already have it
  • It needs sorting
  • Start with five topics
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