← All field notesProduct · April 8, 2026 · 5 min read

Guided walkthroughs are the answer when telling is not enough

Most AI support agents stop at retrieval. We added a guided walkthrough mode because retrieval alone left customers confused on the second click.

Layla HassanHead of Product

A retrieval-augmented agent is great at "where is X" but bad at "show me how X is done." Customers are not always literate in your terminology, and a citation pointing at a four-thousand-word docs page is rarely the answer they wanted.

We built a tool-use mode in Nexus where the agent can decide, mid-conversation, that talking is not enough — and trigger a guided walkthrough. The widget renders a spotlight, side-rail, or ghost-cursor narrator depending on the page complexity.

The spotlight pattern is conventional. The side-rail pattern is for multi-step flows where the user needs to keep their place in the page. The ghost-cursor narrator is the differentiator: an animated cursor moves across the customer's actual UI, pausing to narrate why each click matters.

The first time you watch a customer realize what their own product does, you understand why this is the highest-converting feature in the platform.