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Getting Started with AiKA

Overview​

What is AiKA?​

AiKA (AI Knowledge Assistant), currently in its development phase, is an internal AI-powered agent designed to interact conversationally with your company's systems and tools. AiKA uses an agentic approach to perform advanced reasoning and multi-step problem solving, integrating with TechDocs and the Software Catalog through Portal Actions. This enables AiKA to plan, execute, and adapt actions across these platforms, providing context-aware assistance beyond simple information retrieval.

Why AiKA?​

  • Controlled Knowledge Base: You get answers based on a curated and relevant documents within your organization, which will be much more accurate than general LLM usage. Inquire about anything across TechDocs, Software Catalog, and more in one place.
  • Bring your own models: You choose what models and providers AiKA uses in the backend based on what works for your organization.
  • Compliance: Because the underlying LLM and re-ranking technologies are highly customizable, you know exactly where data is flowing.
  • Portal-Native Intelligence: With its agentic approach, AiKA can leverage reasoning and MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers to perform complex, multi-step problem solving and access specialized tools from your Portal instance.

Key Capabilities​

AiKA offers a range of advanced features designed to enhance your ability to find and utilize knowledge across your organization:

  • Tool Integration: Access to specialized tools including:
    • Portal Actions: Portal-native actions (e.g., get-catalog-entity to fetch entities from your software catalog)
    • MCP servers: Extended functionality through MCP integrations
    • Internal tools: Specialized reasoning capabilities
  • Advanced Reasoning: Analyzes complex problems, breaks them into logical steps, and provides structured solutions
  • Multi-Step Problem Solving: Plans approaches, executes research across multiple sources, and adapts based on findings

AiKA breaks down complex queries into logical steps, uses Portal Actions to gather data, and provides structured results through autonomous reasoning.

AiKA System Example

Knowledge Sources: What AiKA is aware of​

AiKA draws from internal sources (more to come):

  • TechDocs: Internal documentation, including engineering, data, product, and, process docs.
  • Confluence: Confluence spaces indexed by Backstage search can be used as a knowledge source.
  • Catalog: Software catalog information can be used as a knowledge source.

In general, AiKA will be able to draw from any source that is indexed by Backstage Search, and requires that If you have a custom collator you've set up, you can add the name associated with the collator to the aika > knowledgeTypes section in the Config Manager.

To configure AiKA to draw from specific sources, you can add the source to the aika > knowledgeTypes section in the Config Manager. The most common sources are:

aika:
  knowledgeTypes:
    - techdocs
    - confluence
    - software-catalog

Installation​

Enabling AiKA in Portal​

You have the option to enable or disable AiKA at any time through the Config Manager.

Set up Parameters​

Screenshot detailing AiKA Config

aika > models > language (required): The LLM provider and model to use for the chat completion and keyword extraction.

  • Format: PROVIDER|MODEL
  • Example: openai|gpt-4o

aika > models > re-ranking (optional): Provide a re-ranking model. This is useful for improving the relevance of the generated content and reducing inconsistencies created by document indexing.

The integrations page lists LLM providers, reranking capability providers, and their models that AiKA supports. Please enable the module you'd like to use in the Config Manager, and fill out its appropriate configuration.