For how well AI products work a majority of the time, it’s easy to forget that they hallucinate, miss edge cases, even surface bugs you’ve never seen before.

Often, this happens at the worst possible moment: during a live demo. And a single weird response can undercut months of selling.

Interactive demos help you avoid that worst-case scenario. They make sure your product performs consistently every time and that the coolest features get the “wows” they deserve.

Below, we share three tips for building interactive demos for your AI product, three places to use those demos across your funnel, and three examples of SaaS teams using AI demos to close more deals.

Because AI features are so dynamic, it can be hard to do them justice in more static Captures. But there are three ways to make your AI features look and feel real:

1. Use Animated Text to Simulate AI in Action

If your product has a chat-like interface for answering questions or a responsive terminal for writing code, people want to see exactly how AI responds.

But it’s tough to show that live – generated outputs are never the same twice.

And static before-and-after screenshots skip over the whole “thinking” part, making prospects skeptical that the feature is actually working.

With Navattic’s Animating Text Magic Editor, you can make it look like someone is typing in a question or coding prompt and seeing an AI-generated response appear right in front of their eyes.

All you have to do is:

1. Highlight the “typing” text you want to animate in your Capture.
2. Click Magic Editors → Animating Text → Apply Animation.
3. Pick your trigger. For example, “On screen load.”
4. Adjust your speed. It should be fast enough to feel snappy, but slow enough to read.
5. Preview the step to make sure it looks natural.
6. Repeat for the AI-generated response.

2. Insert pre-built videos or GIFs into your demo

Some AI features are just too complex or too unpredictable to simulate with screenshots or animated text.

Things like agentic workflows running across multiple tools, AI voice conversations, or generative outputs that are more visually dynamic, like images, videos, or charts.

To show those off, we recommend embedding a short video or GIF directly into your demo flow.

That way, buyers get to watch your product do the most impressive things end to end, exactly the way you want them to see it.

3. Add AI voiceovers and translations

It’s not always crystal clear what’s so great about a feature from a Capture, video, or GIF – you have to talk prospects through it.

But recording your own accompanying narration is a pain, especially when your product changes constantly.

Navattic’s AI Voiceovers let you guide viewers through your demo and call attention to what makes your AI features special.

To add a voiceover to a specific step in your demo, go to the Flow Builder, click Add element, and then Voiceover. From there, use the dropdown to have the AI:

• Read from a custom script you’ve written.
• Read directly from the text in your Modal or Tooltip.
• Play your own audio file (MP3, M4A, WAV, or MIDI).

Note: If you have international buyers, you don’t have to manually create separate demos for each market. Use Navattic’s Translations feature to support multi-language demos and automatically translate AI voiceovers or avatars.

Once you’ve built an AI interactive demo, it’s time to get it in front of buyers. Here are three places to put yours:

1. On your website and in marketing campaigns

AI product websites all sound the same right now. “Streamline your workflows,” “unlock team productivity,” “accelerate decision-making,” “automate your busywork.”

These buzzwords don’t tell prospects what your product does. An interactive demo is the fastest way to answer “What does this product do for me?”

To make the demo as concrete and useful for prospects as possible, we suggest anchoring it in a real workflow or outcome.

That matters even more for flexible, multi-use products, where buyers could use your tool a hundred different ways.

As Tiffany Hsia at Notion put it, “We have what I’d call a unique challenge in that we are a very horizontal product. We connect all knowledge, workflows, projects, and AI into a flexible tool users love. Some users refer to Notion as their second brain.

That’s hard to describe. So instead of telling people about Notion, we decided to show them. Interactive demos became our way to let potential users experience our product firsthand.”

2. For product launches

Normally, you’d launch a new product with a sizzle reel.

But as we’ve seen over the past few years, AI moves quickly. Which means every time you finish a product video, you’ll have to re-record it a few months later – and remember to replace it in every email nurture, blog, and docs page.

“Just as we finished with the perfect demo, we’d get hit with a new AI capability. Every time we recorded a demo, it felt like we were hit with a built-in expiration date,” Joann Ng at ActiveCampaign shares.

Interactive demos don’t have that hard expiration date.

You can swap Captures, videos, and GIFs in and out, rewrite Tooltips, and customize beacons in a matter of clicks.

Navattic’s Magic Editors even allow you to make edits in bulk:

• Find + Replace replaces all instances of a specific word, phrase, or image across an entire capture
• Table AI uses AI to edit your data based on your prompt (e.g., make all these accounts edtech companies)
• Up-to-date finds and adjusts old dates to the current day

Those changes will appear wherever you’ve already linked to or embedded your demo.

That flexibility is how Joann’s team built 23 product tours in just three months. “It’s something that would have been impossible with our old video recording process.”

3. In the sales cycle

Sending an interactive demo ahead of a sales call lets prospects explore your AI product on their own.

By the time they hop on with your team, they already understand how the product works.

Instead of wasting time covering the basics, SEs and AEs can jump straight into a more detailed discovery or show the prospect a feature that complements what they already saw in the demo.

Emily Casaccio’s team at Haloo took this approach to launch a new AI product in a legacy-dominated industry:

“We created a comprehensive ‘master demo,’ broken into targeted flows for different use cases. We distribute these to prospects before sales calls and at conferences, which has completely transformed our demo approach.”

Sharing the ‘master demo’ with prospects makes it obvious who isn’t truly interested in the product, improving qualification and deal probability.

It’s also made sales calls more targeted and productive: “In the sales call itself, we can say, ‘I see that you spent a lot of time looking at comprehensive search. I would love to talk to you about that.’”

When building your first AI demo, it can help to have some inspiration. Here are three AI demos to model yours after:

1. Okteto

Okteto, a developer platform, uses Navattic’s Animating Text Magic Editor to make it seem like their product responds to user commands.

For example, in one step, it asks users to type “okteto up” into the terminal.

As soon as the user does this, it looks like the app is starting to spin up an environment. In reality, the Okteto team animated the response and adjusted the timing so that it looks realistic.

This approach is paying off. Ramiro Berrelleza, Founder and CEO at Okteto, emphasizes:

“I’m a big fan of how Navattic handles code-centric experiences specifically. Once we added interactive demos directly to our landing pages at Okteto, the difference was immediate. And the data backed it up.”

Check out all of Okteto’s Navattic product tours →

2. Dremio

Dremio, an open data lakehouse platform, uses an interactive demo to show how its AI agent answers complex data-related questions.

The demo on their homepage, for example, opens with a common challenge for their ICP: how do you make sense of a dataset with over a billion rows?

In the demo, the user asks Dremio’s AI Agent to provide an overview of the data. As soon as they click submit, typing bubbles appear to indicate that the agent is scanning the metadata.

A few seconds later, an overview of the path, schema, notes, and potential exploratory next steps starts to populate.

Throughout the demo, users can ask the agent more advanced questions, like: “Can you analyze hourly Citi Bike ride patterns and show it in a line graph?”

Grounding AI demos in specific, recognizable use cases, like Dremio’s, is what makes your product’s value concrete for a buyer.

3. Notion

An interactive demo was especially useful for showcasing Notion’s Enterprise Search feature.

They framed the demo around a common scenario for managers: prepping for quarterly reviews.

A manager types the prompt “What projects is Renee working on?” into Notion AI. Then, the agent “thinks,” “searches,” and “summarizes” results from GitHub PRs, Jira tasks, and Slack conversations to help the user write a detailed, data-backed review.

And this is only one of Notion’s demos. They have a dedicated demo hub with separate tours for different segments of their ICP so no one is forced down a single path that may or may not apply to their day-to-day.

For instance, one shows an agent turning a brainstorm into a product roadmap, another shows an agent creating a marketing research report.

Check out all of Notion’s Navattic product tours →

Build your first AI interactive demo for free.