Most companies are looking for ways to use AI across the customer journey. And customer onboarding is a great place to start. AI’s biggest opportunity in post-sales is taking on the manual work so your teams spend more time building relationships, making judgment calls, and delivering customer value. That’s where AI fits into the Orchestrated Onboarding® framework. Across the six stages, Embark, Handoff, Kickoff, Adopt, Review, and Expand, AI helps you gather information, analyze data, spot patterns, personalize experiences, and identify risks and opportunities. Of course, AI does not replace the orchestration, but it does help scale onboarding and deliver value faster.
AI is the number one priority for 46% of onboarding teams, according to The State of Customer Onboarding in 2026 from GUIDEcx. AI adoption, on the other hand, is still early. In fact, most teams are still experimenting and using AI for internal workflows, summaries, and spinning up tasks; not yet touching the customer experience directly, according to the report.
Read on to learn how to execute AI impactfully by weaving AI into each of the six stages of the Orchestrated Onboarding® (shown below).
1. Embark: Start Before the Deal Closes
When companies ask me how to fix their onboarding and implementation issues, I often provide the same answer: start onboarding earlier. When you address potential blockers during the sales cycle, onboarding runs more smoothly and more easily throughout. The purpose of the first stage of onboarding, Embark, is to help customers see the path to their outcomes, stay focused on what’s needed to reach their goals, and understand what success will require. Starting with Embark helps you build trust with new customers, even before the deal closes.
Use AI during Embark to engage prospects and new customers in a personalized way and at scale. For example, consider producing customer-specific welcome hubs or onboarding portals that provide:
- A high-level visual overview of the onboarding journey
- Relevant content based on product, use case, or customer segment
- Expectations for customer participation
- Links to schedule upcoming meetings including the Kickoff
- Activities customers can begin before Kickoff, like acting on internal approvals or completing steps to integrate with critical systems
Building specific agents by product line, customer segment, or use case are other value-add so these hubs and portals don’t require ongoing manual updates. Internally, AI helps by identifying signals from the sales cycle, like deal velocity, stakeholder engagement, and contract complexity, and flag onboarding risk before the customer even starts.
Learn more about the Embark stage.
2. Handoff: Building internal and customer alignment
The Handoff is the transition from the buyer journey to the customer journey, and its job is to align internal teams, prepare post-sales teams, and seamlessly move buyers into their customer journey with you. The Handoff continues to be a major frustration for most onboarding teams. While your employees grapple with a lack of data and preparation, customer frustrations rise when they repeatedly share the same information with both pre- and post-sales teams.
The Handoff includes huge possibilities for AI. Instead of relying on one person’s memory or a completed field or opportunity, AI looks across the full deal history, sales calls, commitments, CRM data, customer goals, and success criteria and pulls that into a structured briefing to prepare onboarding and implementation teams.
Put AI to use with:
- Capturing the business outcomes customers are aiming to achieve
- Providing company briefing documents for post-sales teams
- Surfacing promises and commitments
- Identifying missing information
- Highlighting risks and dependencies
- Documenting key stakeholders
- Drafting both the internal handoff and customer handoff meeting agendas and slides
- Creating an initial success plan to review and validate with customers
With AI compiling the details and informing the teams, the Handoff becomes a simple review and validation stage that propels onboarding momentum.
Learn more about the Handoff stage.
3. Kickoff: Let AI Handle the Tactical Work
By the Kickoff stage, the strategic goals should be fully understood by both internal and customer teams. In the Kickoff you get tactical and focused on timelines, milestones, deliverables, roles, responsibilities, and an early quick win.
AI can remove a tremendous amount of preparation work from the Kickoff. Imagine feeding the customer profile and intake information into an AI agent and generating a customized kickoff agenda, deck, and project plan in minutes.
You might also use AI and digital tools to create:
- Tailored project plans
- Interactive Kickoff microsites with tailored content and personalized resources for each persona and stakeholder
- Digital project workspaces
- Automated question and answer assistants
Another major opportunity involves data onboarding. Cleansing, preparing, and migrating data and files frequently slow implementations down. AI can help validate, organize, map, and prepare information so customers and implementation teams spend less time troubleshooting files. Let AI handle the tactical work so your teams prioritize the work technology cannot do for them: building trust and confidence.
Learn more about the Kickoff stage.
4. Adopt: Deliver the Right Content at the Right Time
The Adopt Stage usually takes the longest time to work through. As the heart of Orchestrated Onboarding, it includes not only the implementation, but also user enablement and adoption, change management, and actions to deliver first value. One of the biggest mistakes companies make in the Adopt stage is overwhelming new users with a deluge of information and content to assist with implementing and adopting the new solution. This is not how people learn or adopt something new.
To truly engage new users, it is critical to give the right content to the right user at the right time. AI makes this much easier with personalized learning pathways, guided walkthroughs, in-product guidance, AI coaches and co-pilots, and role- specific and contextual recommendations based on each persona and the goals they are trying to reach. For example, an executive who mostly works in dashboards will not require the same enablement and information as a receptionist at a dental practice living in the solution to schedule and manage patients daily.
On the internal side, AI helps teams monitor the implementation process, enablement, and adoption by monitoring and analyzing usage patterns and flagging where customers get stuck or adoption stalls out. Then, it triggers the right intervention. Whether the intervention is an agent nudge, an email reminder, or a human reach out, the goal isn’t to automate every interaction. Use AI to help teams know when and where to engage and to drive the biggest impact.
Learn more about the Adopt stage.
5. Review: Stop Giving Status Updates
After the tactical work of implementation and adoption, Review is where you demonstrate the value you delivered and look ahead to the next milestone. It’s a deliberate shift back to strategic, and done well, it reinforces momentum and keeps customers from falling off the value cliff.
The goal of any review meeting is a discussion, and AI’s job is to make that possible by handling the reporting, so teams don’t have to build it manually. Internally, AI pulls together usage, outcomes, and business impact into one or two succinct slides. For the customer, it can generate value summaries and executive ready reports you share before the meeting, so the precious time together is a value conversation instead of a data dump.. Afterward, AI can draft the action plan that keeps both teams moving forward.
Learn more about the Review stage.
6. Expand: Keep the Value Journey Going
While Expand is the sixth stage of the framework, I don’t call it the final stage because customer value is an ongoing journey. The Expand stage is about growing customer value over time through strategic planning, roadmap conversations, new use cases, broader adoption, and expansion opportunities.
You’re probably already scaling parts of Expand with newsletters, webinars, user groups, and ongoing training. AI adds a proactive layer with usage analysis, ROI reporting, renewal risk prediction, and expansion opportunities surfaced before they would be manually caught. An agent can score accounts by expansion readiness and draft the outreach angle for your CSM or account manager to make personal outreaches that matter. That turns expansion from “I have to go sell something else,” to asking, “What’s the next value we can help this customer achieve?”
Learn more about the Expand stage.
The best customer onboarding still feels human, guided, and personal. Used right, AI does not replace people. While AI can do more of the data gathering, analysis, preparation, personalization, and pattern spotting, it’s the people that build trust and make judgement calls. We have a huge opportunity: Use AI to free your team, to be more human, and to deliver more value to both your customers and your company. The companies that thrive with AI will go beyond automating customer interactions. They will orchestrate human-centered customer journeys more intelligently, so their teams focus attention where human engagement creates the most value. Where in the six stages is AI most needed right now?
DONNA WEBER is a globally recognized customer value and onboarding expert with a decades-long track record of success as a strategic consultant to high-growth companies. Renowned for her approach to turning customers into loyal champions, companies bring Donna in when they’re ready to level up by moving fast in the right direction. Her relentless focus on the customer helps them scale smarter by delivering on the lifetime value they promise from day one. Her bestselling book, Onboarding Matters, is considered a definitive guide to post-sale customer success. Learn more at donnaweber.com.
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