Knowledge overview

Knowledge holds everything your agent should know that is not in your product catalog: shipping and delivery rules, returns and exchanges, payment options, store policies, opening hours, and the questions your team answers every day. When a customer asks, the agent searches the folders connected to it and writes its reply from the articles it finds. Open it with Knowledge in the sidebar, under Your agent.

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How it is organized

Onboarding creates your first folder, Business Knowledge Base, and connects it to the agent it created. Popcorn fills it with up to 8 pages it picked from your website, or with the description you wrote if you had no website. Those pages are live for the agent from the start; until you open one for the first time, its Used by agent and Last updated cells stay empty. See Create folders and articles for what to do with them next.

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What the agent does with your articles

1. You connect one or more folders to an agent and publish the agent. See Connect knowledge to an agent.
2. When a customer message needs store knowledge, the agent searches the connected folders. Each folder is searched separately, and the folder’s description tells the agent what kind of question that folder answers.
3. The search returns the best-matching passages from the published articles in that folder. The agent writes its reply from those passages.
4. Popcorn records which articles were matched and which were cited in the reply. This powers Used by agent on the Knowledge page and Sources in the Inbox.

Only published content takes part in step 3. A draft, an unsaved edit, or a restored but unpublished version never reaches the agent.

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The Knowledge page

The header has New folder and New article. Below it, the folder picker reads All folders or Folder · name. When you pick one folder, a ⋯ menu next to the picker offers Rename folder and Delete folder. Search articles looks at article titles only, not their content, and the table shows 10 articles per page. The table shows one row per article: Click a row to open the article. The ⋯ menu at the end of a row offers Delete. On a phone, the status and date sit under the title instead of in their own columns. When you have no articles yet, the page shows No articles yet with New article in the middle of the page instead of the header. New article opens three choices: Write from scratch, Import from a link and Upload a document.

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Draft and published

Every article page shows a badge next to the title and a line under it that says whether the agent uses what is on screen. Publishing is the only action that changes what the agent answers. Saving a draft, restoring an old version or previewing never does. Deleting an article removes it from the agent immediately.

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Used by agent

Open an article and look at Details to see the numbers behind the badge:

• Matched N times: a search returned the article in the last 30 days, but the agent did not necessarily use it in a reply.
• Cited N times · last used time: the agent used the article when writing a reply.
• Not used yet: no search has returned it in the last 30 days.

Click the figure to open Recent conversations, a list of the conversations that used the article, each with an Open conversation link. Conversations where the article was cited carry a Cited tag. In the Inbox, an AI reply that searched your knowledge has a line under it, Searched the knowledge base, with a Sources (N) button when specific articles were cited. It opens Message source, which lists the Tool used and, under Knowledge used, each article the agent cited with the version that was live at the time. See Inbox overview.

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Who can do what

Permissions are set per role on Knowledge base under Settings → Roles and permissions:

• Owner, Admin and Manager have full access: create, edit, publish, restore and delete.
• Agent and Viewer can read articles but not change them.

Publishing needs permission to publish; without it the Publish button is disabled and shows You don’t have permission to publish. Restoring an earlier version needs permission to edit (You don’t have permission to restore versions). The role editor has no separate Publish column: for a custom role, publishing comes with Full access on Knowledge base. See Team and roles.

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Knowledge or a tool?

Knowledge is for facts that stay the same from one conversation to the next: policies, procedures, prices you write down, FAQs. For anything the agent has to look up live in another system, such as a booking, a loyalty balance or a repair status, create a custom tool instead.

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Next steps