Knowledge Base

Your knowledge base is the additional context you give to your AI agents. It lets you tailor how they work and the information they operate on — so your agents can give accurate, grounded responses based on your own content.

Once you connect a source, Pickaxe keeps it current automatically: websites are re-checked and only reprocessed when their content actually changes, and Google Drive files sync in near real time — when the file changes in Drive, the knowledge base picks it up.

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Supported sources

You can connect a wide range of content types to your knowledge base:

A few things happen behind the scenes so more of your content "just works":

• Scanned documents are OCR'd. If a PDF or Word file is a scan with no extractable text, Pickaxe reads the text from the page images automatically.
• Audio and video are transcribed into searchable text.
• Spreadsheets and data files are parsed so agents can answer from their rows, not just their raw text.

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Where to add knowledge

There are two places you can manage your knowledge base, each serving a different purpose.

Workspace-level knowledge base

The Knowledge Base tab in your dashboard is where you manage knowledge across your entire workspace. From here you can:

• Add files — upload individual files or whole folders, add web pages or full websites, or pull documents in from Notion, Google Drive, OneNote, or OneDrive & SharePoint.
• View all uploaded files — see every file in your workspace knowledge base along with its refresh state and number of chunks.
• Manage sources — add, remove, or refresh any connected source, and choose which tools each document is attached to. When you upload, Pickaxe asks whether the documents should be available across the workspace or only to specific tools.

What are chunks? When you upload a file, Pickaxe breaks it down into smaller pieces called chunks. This allows the AI to search through your content efficiently and pull out the most relevant sections when responding to a user. The number of chunks depends on the size and structure of your content.

Files uploaded at the workspace level are available to any agent in your workspace, but they are not automatically added to an agent by default — you choose which knowledge each agent has access to.

Agent-level knowledge base

The Knowledge tab inside the Agent Builder lets you manage knowledge for a specific agent. From here you can:

• Add new sources directly — anything you upload here will also appear in your workspace knowledge base.
• Pull in existing files from your workspace knowledge base to give that agent access.
• Add context instructions — provide additional guidance for how the AI should use the information from each source.

This gives you flexibility: build a shared library of content at the workspace level, then pick and choose what each individual agent needs.

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The Knowledge Explorer

The Knowledge Explorer button at the top of the Knowledge Base tab opens a window into exactly what your agents can retrieve.

• Explore all files or a selection. The dropdown next to "Explore" lists every document with its chunk count — check the ones you want to inspect, or browse everything at once.
• Browse the chunks. The table shows each chunk with the file it came from and its text, so you can see precisely how your content was split up.
• Test retrieval with a real query. Type a question into the Search chunks bar and the Explorer runs the same semantic search your agents use, showing which chunks are surfaced, how relevant each one is, and how many tokens they'd consume.

It's the fastest way to debug a knowledge base: if an agent gives a wrong or vague answer, run the user's question through the Explorer and you'll see exactly what the agent had to work with — and which document needs better content.