With a focus to change the approach that developers look for and interface with internal documentation, Spotify announced launching AiKA — an AI powered knowledge assistant through Spotify’s Backstage Portal Cloud. The AiKA is a fast, reliable, and context aware technical knowledge assistant, that saves developers time by avoiding documentation and wiki searches.
AiKA uses a technique called Retrieval Augmented Generation, or RAG, which combines large language models (LLMs) with dynamic data retrieval from a company’s internal resources. By doing so, AiKA can return answers made based on the most contemporary and useful internal documentation available and not solely relying on pre trained data. Instead, it draws content directly from engineering handbooks, service catalogs, API references, and even onboarding material, giving you precise, conversational answers in seconds.
AiKA aims to solve the massive productivity challenge faced by every engineering team: searching for information is an inefficient way of doing things. Developers spend a lot of time buried in disorganized or out of date internal docs, knocking other developers, or waiting to hear back from the team lead. Thanks to AiKA, that sort of delay is minimized. Where you want to understand service dependencies, request information about infrastructure policies, or refer to deployment instructions, AiKA knows how to get back to you quickly with precision.
After noticing that teams got bogged down in fragmented documentation and the overhead of communication, Spotify created AiKA. AiKA fills a need in this Backstage Portal Cloud ecosystem, sitting within the heart of the developer experience, alongside the work Spotify is doing to make our developer portal more integrated and easier to use. Developers can talk to assistant conversationally in natural language, just as one would with a human teammate.
Additionally, AiKA adapts to a company’s specific context. It is more relevant than generic AI assistants as it understands internal naming conventions, toolchains and workflows. With this, it is possible to index these specific sources of truth within an organisation, for example, Confluence pages, internal git repositories or custom CMS systems.
Now, all Backstage Portal Cloud users will have access to this assistant, with it set to become a core part of how teams onboard new developers, solve issues, and manage documentation. With more companies embracing AI to automate their internal operations, AiKA is an important advancement towards democratizing and translating technical knowledge in real time.
