Episode
30: Building AiKA: Spotify’s AI Knowledge Assistant
- Podcast
- NerdOut@Spotify
- Published
- Aug 14, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 2318
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Summary
Hear about the journey behind building Spotify’s AI knowledge assistant, aka AiKA — from hack projects to internal chatbot, to enterprise developer tool. While general purpose chatbots are being used everywhere, they often fall short when it comes to navigating company-specific information — like which internal policy applies to your team or where to find the doc someone shared in Slack three months ago. That’s why we built AiKA. Using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), AiKA taps into Spotify’s internal knowledge sources to provide employees with context-aware answers right when they need them. Host and principal engineer Dave Zolotusky is joined by senior engineers Majd Salman and Jofre Mateu to discuss AiKA’s evolution from a bunch of hack week experiments to a unified chatbot platform now used weekly by 25% of Spotify’s employees and 87% of our developers. They share why RAG is the right approach for making an internal chatbot accurate and fast, how AiKA has cut the time it takes to resolve internal support requests by 47%, and how we’re extending AiKA’s agentic capabilities with MCP. 🤖 Want to see how AiKA can supercharge knowledge sharing where you work? Sign up to try Spotify Portal for Backstage at: https://backstage.spotify.com/try-portal/ Learn more about Spotify’s AI knowledge assistant: Our KubeCon talk: Leveraging Internal Knowledge: Building AiKA at Spotify The New Stack: Introducing AiKA: Backstage Portal AI Knowledge Assistant TechCrunch: Backstage access: Spotify’s dev tools side-hustle is growing legs Spotify’s Backstage Blog: AI knowledge assistant and data plugins coming to Spotify Portal Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com You should follow us on Twitter @SpotifyEng , LinkedIn ,…