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Knowledge turns a workflow’s parsed documents into a searchable knowledge base. Completed runs made while the node exists add their parsed documents to a per-workflow corpus. You browse and search the corpus in the app, and you ask questions in the app or through the API. Every answer cites the page and region it came from. Knowledge appears in the Intelligence section of the Studio palette. Knowledge is in beta: its behavior and API may change. The node has no options. Its presence opts the workflow into knowledge ingestion.

The node

The Python builder (client.workflow(...)) has no knowledge() method, so the example builds the graph as a WorkflowDefinition. The API requires an inbound edge into the node, but the edge selects no input: indexing reads every parsed file in the completed run.

Index existing documents

Adding the node does not automatically index documents from runs that finished before the node existed. In the workflow’s Knowledge tab, a member can choose Index existing documents for the first corpus, or Retry indexing after a failed attempt. While the action runs, the tab shows Indexing documents. Once a corpus exists, it never needs a manual update: new or changed documents are re-indexed in the background automatically, and the existing corpus keeps serving Ask and Browse throughout. The action reuses processed documents. It does not re-extract them. It is a maintenance action in the app, not an API or MCP workflow.

Ask a question

Once a usable index exists, ask the corpus through POST /v3/workflows/{workflow_id}/knowledge/ask:
Pass a thread_id that starts with kb- to ask a follow-up in the context of earlier questions in that thread. Omit it and each question stands alone. The full request and response, with the error codes, is on Ask. An AI agent asks the same question through the ask_knowledge tool of the MCP server.

In Studio

Drag Knowledge from the palette and it appears as a band around the whole graph, not as a card, because its scope is the whole workflow. Its panel has nothing to configure; it explains what the node does and points you to the workflow’s Knowledge tab, where you browse the indexed documents and ask questions. The Knowledge base band around the graph

Options

The node has no fields. id and type are all it carries. The schema the API accepts is generated from the same source: Knowledge node schema.

Connects to

Knowledge accepts one edge from Parse, Classify, Extract or Validate. It is terminal: nothing can follow it. Which accepted node feeds it makes no difference because indexing reads the completed run. A workflow has at most one Knowledge node; the API rejects a second one.

What it returns

Nothing in the run results. Knowledge emits nothing downstream and adds no section to the run. It writes to the workflow’s knowledge base instead. Completed runs ingest parsed files while Knowledge is present. The corpus keeps the current parsed content for each live file. The corpus is workflow-scoped, not version-scoped. It can contain parses from older workflow versions, but it is not a version history. You read the corpus in two places:
  • The Knowledge tab in the app: browse the documents, search them, and ask questions.
  • POST /v3/workflows/{workflow_id}/knowledge/ask: an answer plus citations, each resolved to a file_id, a page and a bbox in the source PDF. Without a Knowledge node the endpoint returns 409 KNOWLEDGE_NOT_ENABLED. 409 KNOWLEDGE_NOT_READY means no usable snapshot is available yet.

Billing

  • Indexing: 2 credits per page whose source content is new or changed in a completed run. Re-running unchanged documents costs nothing. Backfill, repair and an unchanged reindex are maintenance and do not spend knowledge-index credits.
  • Asking: 8 credits per 10,000 effective input tokens the answering agent reads. A narrow question over a small corpus costs a fraction of a broad sweep over a large one. A question the organization cannot pay for is refused with 402 before it runs.
Browsing and searching in the app are free. Full price list: How credits work.

Examples

  • Contract analysis: a contract workflow whose documents have lasting value. Add Knowledge and “which suppliers have a 90-day termination clause?” becomes answerable with citations.
  • Invoice processing: the usual Parse to Extract shape. Add Knowledge after Extract to keep every invoice searchable.