The interactive demo market is booming. A solid majority of online businesses leverage interactive content in some shape or form, from small companies to large enterprises like Zapier.
Here are some trends we’re keeping an eye on this year:
1. "Demo-as-a-Service" (DaaS):
We'll see the emergence of specialized DaaS providers who handle the entire demo creation, hosting, and analytics process for SaaS companies.
Although most interactive demo solutions already offer capabilities spanning automated captures to insights, the scope may widen to allow businesses to focus on their core product while outsourcing the demo expertise to solutions providers.
Why it's significant: This trend reflects the increasing importance of demos in the SaaS sales cycle and the need to create hyper-personalized content at scale. It also reflects the growing need for leaders to consolidate. If solutions like Arcade can handle all aspects of demos in the customer journey, from marketing to sales to product growth, it makes it much more efficient.
Example: Arcade (that’s us 👋) has started to launch features to tap into a larger audience size.
For example, the ability to replace video recording software like Screen Studio with more recording and video-first capabilities ⤵️
Or features like collections, which let sales teams send personalized demo libvraries to accounts ⤵️
Other platforms like Walnut have leaned into sandboxes to tap into the live-demo use cases.
2. The rise of AI-driven demo optimization:
AI can help interactive demos get beyond basic personalization. AI will not only personalize demos but also optimize their structure and content in real-time based on user engagement and conversion data.
Why it's significant: This moves beyond static demos, creating dynamic, self-learning experiences that adapt to individual users and overall performance data.
Examples: An AI engine that analyzes user interactions within a demo and automatically adjusts the order of features shown, the depth of explanations, or even the visual style to maximize engagement.
You can use Arcade’s AI demo copilot to craft better-performing demos. How is this different from a regular help agent? Arcade AI has been trained on 14,000 proprietary demos created by our customers and can reference our benchmark data to compare your demo against the best-performing 1% of demos.
Other interesting AI use cases for interactive demos:
- Predict lead quality based on demo engagement patterns.
- Adjust demo chapters based on real-time user engagement.
- Automatically write engagement messages based on demo analytics.
- Dynamically create personalized demos based on scrapped data about your prospects (both public and in your systems of record).
- Auto-create tailored visuals for prospects as they interact with your demos.
Read more: AI in Interactive Demos: 15 Use Cases for 2025.
3. Heavier focus on “micro-demos”
2025 will be the year of bite-sized interactive experiences. Instead of lengthy, comprehensive demos, we'll see a rise in short, focused "micro-demos" highlighting specific features or use cases.
These are ideal for capturing attention in a world of shrinking attention spans.
Why it's significant: This caters to the modern user's preference for quick, easily digestible information and allows for more targeted and compelling messaging.
Examples: We see more companies start to embed mini-demos where there would usually be a product screenshot, each showcasing a key feature or use case of the software.
One example is Claybooks on Clay’s website.
These pages walk people through specific workflows that can be set up with Clay and include step-by-step instructions with both a demo video and micro-demos for each step.
Instead of reading each instruction and imagining what it would look and feel like in Clay, viewers can experience it for themselves.
Another example is Nudge. The team has started to embed Arcades everywhere on their site, from lengthy walkthroughs to micro-demos replacing static product screenshots👇
4. People will mass-produce demos
We’ve reached the perfect market conditions for interactive demos to become mass-produced, and 2025 will be the year of automated interactive demos.
- Solutions like Arcade now can turn any product engagement into interactive demos in seconds. Anyone can create interactive demos with tools like HTML capture ⤵️
- There is enough data and case studies to know that interactive demos outperform image and video content.
- Adoption is high enough across SaaS that most GTM operators are willing to consider interactive demos in their strategy (think calendar links 5 years ago).
- Demo engagement insights can be seamlessly integrated with other GTM systems to power contextual workflows.
Why it’s significant: Mass production allows for interactive assets to be created by anyone and embedded everywhere across the customer lifecycle. Without it, it’s hard for teams with limited resources to output micro-demos at scale.
Examples:
Shopmonkey cut announcement launch time by over 50% with Arcade. They created a ‘guided tours’ experience within the product and prompted users upon first login. It resulted in:
- Improved feature discovery
- Reduction in support requests
- Minimized frontline team interactions
- Faster creation process
Capchase, on the other hand, needed a way to validate concepts faster than making demo videos or Figma prototypes. They automated the creation of interactive tours and were able to output content 4x faster.
5. More interactive assets across the customer lifecycle
Interactive demos are starting to be deeply integrated into the customer lifecycle. They used to be an interactive version of your software product, available on your website for prospects to play with before they signed up or requested a demo.
Now, we’re seeing interactive demos used in social media campaigns, dynamic onboarding flows, and more.
A result of that trend will be deeper integrations between interactive demo providers and customer success platforms, onboarding platforms, prospect engagement solutions, and more.
For example, Arcade’s Intercom integration lets you contextual send in-app prompts to users based on how they engage with your demos to increase activation and retention.
The goal → Create personalized experiences for each prospect, user, and customer. It allows a smooth transition from the demo experience to onboarding and product adoption.
Example: Sophisticated Product Growth teams like Wrike’s have started experimenting with utilizing interactive demos in the onboarding experience to maximize user adoption. The app automatically creates a personalized onboarding plan based on the user's interactions and interests then suggests the next steps through interactive guides.
The result? 65% lift in paid conversions ⤵️
Here’s a behind-the-scenes look 👇
To follow up on the earlier example, Nudge’s team, seeing how much more engagement was generated by turning static assets into interactive ones, started leveraging interactive demos in social media campaigns, product changelogs, ads, launch emails, and more 👇
Why it's significant: This creates a unified and personalized customer journey, bridging the gap between pre-sales and post-sales and driving long-term customer value.
What’s next? Get Started in Arcade
Arcade (that’s us 👋) is the most modern interactive demo solution on the market. 14,000 teams at companies Zapier, Wrike, and Clay use Arcade to build stunning, high-converting demos.
Try Arcade for free by clicking here. Still not sure? Request a call with our team 👇
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