(How) Can You Use AI To Onboard Your Users?

Osman Koç is the CEO of UserGuiding, a platform that helps teams improve user onboarding and build in-app experiences that drive adoption.

​We’ve seen many product teams pioneer AI adoption in their organizations, especially with agentic AI tools and coding copilots. AI has enhanced and sped up feature development. However, all these new features and products your team releases one after another require some follow-up.

You need to create onboarding that introduces them to your users, explains why you created them, how they’re useful, how to get started and how to achieve the best outcomes.

Let’s talk about where and when you can utilize AI tools while designing your onboarding flows and communication.

AI Can Handle The Mechanics

The most obvious and quickest way to delegate tasks to AI tools from your onboarding workflow is in creating modals and flows. Just as you use coding agents to develop features and tools, you can use them to develop onboarding flows like guides, checklists, tooltips and banners. One tricky aspect of this approach is that copilots aren’t great at the front end, so UI design and UX still require a lot of polishing and planning from your developers.

Third-party specialized AI tools, like AI-powered onboarding tools, often offer better-trained agents, along with no-code customization and design elements. These tools take the task out of your developers’ hands and put it in your product team’s, who may not be coders or have access to the codebase. Many AI-powered or agentic AI onboarding tools offer onboarding flow optimization, copy/messaging creation, material and flow creation with prompts, and engagement analytics along with suggestions to improve certain aspects of your onboarding.

You can take this one step further: Instead of just bringing in raw engagement data, you can use conversational chatbots to interpret it and even “talk” to it.

AI Can’t Decide What ‘Value’ Means For Your Product Or Users

“Good” onboarding heavily depends on context: