Walnut AI Creation Playbook — Build Demos at the Speed of Thought

Overview

Once upon a time, building demos meant clicking through menus, wrestling with formatting, and rewriting the same copy again and again. 

Those days are over.

Welcome to the Walnut AI Creation Playbook — your guide to building demos with an AI-first workflow.

Think of it as vibe coding for demos: AI that understands your template, your screen content, your narration, and the editor tools at its disposal. It reads your context, interprets your intent, and takes meaningful actions — not just edits.

This playbook brings together Walnut’s AI Power Stack — AI Mode, Story Capture, and InsightsAI — and shows you how to move from: Idea → Structure → Polish → Publish in one seamless creative flow.

Here, AI isn’t a sidekick awkwardly attached to your workflow or a third wheel forcing you to switch between tools. It lives inside the editor, understanding your screens, narration, content, and variables — and helping you turn ideas into publish-ready demos with ease.

Give Your Team the Power to Build Better Demos

More than an overview, this playbook gives teams a practical blueprint to:

• Build high-quality demos faster with built-in AI that lives directly inside the editor — no switching tools, no extra steps.
• Create consistent, on-brand content with AI that automatically applies best practices for structure, clarity, tone, and flow.
• Scale demo production without adding headcount by turning AI into every teammate’s creative co-builder.
• Modernize outdated demos in minutes using AI-driven rewrite, resequence, and restyle capabilities.
• Personalize at scale across personas, segments, and industries with AI-powered variable mapping and tailored messaging.
• Increase adoption across your organization by empowering everyone — not just power users — to build polished, best-practice demos from day one.

AI Mode isn’t just a chatbot. It’s a creative, conversational powerhouse where AI becomes your co-builder: drafting your guided story, shaping steps, refining messaging, applying styling, and helping your team publish polished demos with dramatically fewer clicks.

Why AI Is Essential for Modern Demo Creation

Your product is complex. Your buyers are busy. Your team is stretched. You don’t just need more demos — you need better demos, faster, without sacrificing quality.

That’s where AI changes the game.

Instead of:

• manually capturing every screen,
• guessing the right narrative structure,
• rewriting every step for tone and clarity, and
• fixing formatting across dozens of screens…

…you tell AI what you’re trying to achieve, and it does the heavy lifting.

AI unlocks:

• Speed: Hours of copy, structuring, and formatting work become minutes.
• Clarity: Steps are short, sharp, and benefit-led instead of UI-led.
• Consistency: Every demo follows the same high standards and voice.
• Personalization: Persona- and vertical-specific variants become a prompt, not a project.
• Adaptability: When your product shifts, your demos can keep up.

You bring the story, AI builds the stage.

Why Walnut's Built-In AI (Not Just Any AI) Is the Real Superpower

Generic AI tools can write pretty sentences. 
Walnut’s built-in AI Mode can actually build demos.

Because unlike external AI — which requires copying, pasting, switching tabs, exporting text, and manually stitching everything together — AI Mode lives inside the editor, understands your demo context, and can act on it directly.

Walnut's AI Mode understands:

• your screens and captured HTML,
• your annotations and focus points,
• your templates, guides, and chapters,
• your variables and personalization schema, and
• your editor actions (create, edit, and publish).

That’s the difference between AI that “talks about demos” and AI that creates demos that are ready to ship.

Context-aware AI Mode inside the Walnut can:

• Read captured screen content and layout.
• Interpret your voice narration from Story Capture.
• Understand your guide steps, chapters, and flows.
• Work with your variables and personalization structure.
• Trigger real editor actions inside the product (creation, editing, publishing).

This is where the vibe coding for demos metaphor becomes real:

You describe what you want — Walnut’s AI SmartStack builds, rewrites, reflows, styles, and publishes it.

The AI Mode Workflow

Idea → Structure → Polish → Publish

Use this workflow to build demos the AI-first way — from initial capture to final publish.

Start by capturing your product experience.

• Record your walkthrough with voice + screen.
• Right-click important elements to flag them as potential guide steps.
• Click Create my story for me to auto-generate steps tied to your narration.

Story Capture gives AI Mode the narrative and semantic context it needs to build meaningful steps.

Set a clear narrative direction before diving into details.

Examples:

• “Create a 5-step onboarding demo for new admins.”
• “Draft an executive summary chapter that shows ROI in under 3 steps.”

This establishes the backbone of your story.

AI Mode creates your first draft by:

• Generating step titles and descriptions
• Proposing chapters or logical groupings
• Structuring the flow based on your narration and capture

This gives you a strong starting point without manual setup.

Use short, targeted prompts to adjust messaging and structure.

Examples:

• “Make Steps 1–3 more high-level and Steps 4–7 more tactical.”
• “Rewrite this step in a confident tone.”
• “Shorten all steps so they fit on one line.”

These micro-adjustments quickly elevate clarity and impact.

Add personalization early using variables.

Examples:

• “Find places where we can use variables like {{company_name}} and {{role}}.”
• “Create a CFO version focused on ROI and risk reduction.”

AI Mode identifies and inserts variables so the demo scales across personas and accounts.

Use EditsAI to apply formatting and data cleanup across the demo.

Examples:

• “Update all fonts and colors to match our dark mode branding.”
• “Blur any sensitive information and anonymize client data.”
• “Increase the font size for all client names.”

EditsAI ensures every screen looks consistent and on-brand, without manual formatting.

Run a quick pre-publish QA and ship the demo.

Examples:

• “Before we publish, check for long steps, repeated phrases, and capitalization inconsistencies.”
• “Publish this demo using the existing template settings.”

AI Mode helps validate content quality before your demo goes live.

Use viewer data to refine your demo over time.

• Identify drop-offs, friction points, or unclear steps in Walnut Insights or InsightsAI.
• Feed learnings back into AI Mode:
  • “Tighten the copy on Steps 2 and 3.”
  • “Add a more compelling CTA at the end.”

This create–refine–publish loop ensures your demos get better with every iteration.

AI Mode Prompting Cheat Sheet

AI Mode can create, edit, restyle, personalize, and publish your demos from natural language. These prompts show you how to speak its language.

The Walnut AI Power Stack: Powering Demo Teams to Build Better, Faster

Walnut’s AI-first creation experience runs on three tightly connected layers — each one feeding intelligence, structure, and insight into the next. Together, they form a fluid, AI-powered workflow where you describe what you want, and Walnut does the heavy lifting:

• AI Mode
• Story Capture
• InsightsAI

Together, these layers form the Walnut AI Power Stack — a creation engine that’s faster, smarter, and far more intuitive than old-school manual editing. It’s the most powerful way to turn your product story into an interactive experience at scale.

🤖 AI Mode — The Builder, Workhorse, and Orchestration Layer of the Power Stack

AI Mode is where everything converges — the builder, interface, and operational brain of the Walnut AI Power Stack. It transforms Story Capture’s structured context and your natural-language instructions into fully built, styled, and publish-ready demos.

AI Mode uses:

• the semantic + narrative data from Story Capture,
• the screen structure, UI content, and interaction data you captured,
• your intent expressed in plain language,

…and converts all of it into real editor actions: creation, editing, restructuring, personalization, cleanup, styling, and publishing.

You simply tell it what you want:

“Create a 7-step demo for new admins.”
“Resequence these steps so we show value first.”
“Rewrite everything in a more confident tone.”
“Publish this using the template defaults.”

How AI Mode Handles the Heavy Lifting

Because AI Mode is fully integrated into the editor, it performs the large-scale content and style operations that used to take hours:

• Bulk find-and-replace across screens and steps
• Apply brand styling, dark mode themes, fonts, and formatting at scale
• Clean up or anonymize sensitive data across your screens
• Normalize tone, fix inconsistencies, and modernize outdated copy across entire demos
• Rewrite, restructure, and restyle entire demos in minutes
• Insert variables and personalize content automatically

AI Mode ensures everything you build is clean, consistent, and on-brand — whether steps are generated automatically or refined manually.

The Result

AI Mode doesn’t help you build — it does the building.

• It understands your goal.
• It shapes your story.
• It polishes your content.
• It personalizes your messaging.
• And publishes the finished product.

You’re not clicking through menus or swapping tools — you’re vibe-crafting the demo, and AI Mode handles the rest.

🎙 Story Capture — Your Story, Captured in Real Time

• Record your screen + narration while you walk through your product, or capture screens silently if preferred.
• Walnut collects semantic HTML, UI structure, page content, and interaction data from every screen.
• If narration is included, it’s transcribed and mapped to the on-screen elements you interacted with.
• If narration isn’t included, AI Mode uses the semantic screen data to infer intent, sequence, and meaning.

This captured context becomes the rich narrative and structural backbone AI Mode uses to understand what you did, why you did it, and how to turn that into guided steps.

📊 InsightsAI — The Feedback Engine That Makes Every Demo Smarter

• Identifies drop-off points, confusing steps, or low-engagement screens.
• Highlights what’s resonating, what’s not, and why — using real viewer behavior.
• Suggests narrative, structure, and CTA improvements.
• Feeds insights directly back into AI Mode for rapid iteration.
• Helps every demo get sharper, clearer, and more effective over time.

Where Story Capture fuels creation and EditsAI ensures quality, InsightsAI powers continuous improvement — turning engagement data into better demos across your entire library.

How AI Mode Bakes Best Practices In From Day One

The secret power of Walnut’s AI isn’t just that it builds demos faster — it builds them the right way from the very beginning.

With all four layers of the Power Stack working in sync, you get more than speed. You get quality by default — a foundation that sets the stage for the next unlock:

AI Mode bakes best practices directly into every demo from the very first draft.

What “Baked In Best Practices” Looks Like

• Lead with value, not UI: Flows lean into benefits and outcomes, not just click paths and screens.
• Scannable step length: Step copy is short, clear, and digestible — perfect for busy viewers.
• Aligned voice & tone: Everything reads like one cohesive brand, not 10 different authors.
• Strong structure: Demos naturally break into chapters, intros, transitions, and logical arcs.
• Clean formatting and visual consistency: Fonts, colors, emphasis, and spacing are lined up across every screen.
• Personalization hooks from day one: AI spots and suggests variable opportunities like {{company_name}}, {{role}}, and more.
• Privacy and compliance built-in: EditsAI can blur, anonymize, or randomize sensitive information in a single pass.

Quick Start Guides

• Build a New Demo with AI Mode
• Modernize a Legacy Demo with AI Mode
• Optimize Demos with the AI-Insights Loop

Build a New Demo with AI Mode

With AI Mode, building a new demo feels less like construction and more like creative direction. You bring the vision — AI assembles the flow, drafts the story, and applies best practices automatically. Here’s how to craft a new demo from idea to publish in a seamless, AI-powered flow.

Every demo starts with screens. Add them using whichever method fits your workflow:

• Story Capture: Record your product with voice + screen or silently.
• Single Capture: Capture individual screens for quick updates.
• Screens Library: Reuse screens your team already created.
• Import from Other Templates: Pull in screens or steps from existing demos.

Walnut automatically captures semantic HTML, UI structure, page content, and interaction data — giving AI Mode the context it needs to build accurate guided steps later in the process.

Once your screens are in place, begin in AI Mode by describing your audience, use case, and desired outcome. Think in narratives, not clicks.

“Create a 7-step guided demo for new admins that shows how easy it is to set up dashboards,
invite teammates, and track usage.”

AI Mode uses this direction as the backbone for your structure and messaging.

Ask AI Mode to generate your first guided flow based on the screens you captured.

• If you recorded with narration, AI Mode uses your spoken walkthrough to create step titles, descriptions, and a meaningful sequence.
• If you captured without narration, AI Mode uses semantic HTML, on-screen content, and UI structure to infer intent and build the flow.

You can also use the Create my story for me button in the Guides panel to quickly generate a draft.

AI Mode will produce:

• guide steps with narrative text mapped to each screen 
• a clean, logical sequence based on your narration or screen context 
• guide steps pulled from your highlights or inferred from narration

AI Mode becomes your structural editor and co-writer. You can:

• shorten or expand step descriptions,
• adjust tone and messaging to match your brand,
• reorder steps or reshape chapters to strengthen your narrative.

“Make Steps 1–3 feel high-level and Steps 4–7 more tactical.”
“Rewrite all step descriptions in a confident, friendly tone.”
“Add a short intro step that sets the stage for first-time users.”

Use AI Mode to surface variable opportunities so your demo is personalization-ready from day one.

“Find places where we mention a company or user and replace them with variables like {{company_name}} and {{role}}.”

AI Mode includes powerful bulk-editing abilities for cleanup, formatting, and styling. You can:

• apply consistent formatting across all steps,
• update fonts, colors, and themes at scale,
• blur or anonymize sensitive data,
• apply final tone and clarity adjustments across the entire demo.

“Apply our dark mode styling to all headings and step text.”
“Blur any sensitive information and anonymize client data.”

Use AI Mode for a final QA pass before publishing:

“Check this demo for long steps, inconsistent capitalization, and repeated phrases.
Fix what you find and confirm we’re ready to publish.”

“Publish this demo using the current template settings.”

Modernize a Legacy Demo with AI Mode

Legacy demos often contain outdated messaging, inconsistent formatting, or flows that no longer reflect your current product narrative. With the Walnut AI Power Stack — AI Mode, Story Capture, and InsightsAI — you can modernize older demos without manual rebuilds or busywork.

Whether you're refreshing a high-traffic onboarding asset, updating a sales demo, or standardizing voice and tone across your library, AI Mode handles the heavy lifting.

Refresh the language in seconds — across one step or the entire demo.

“Rewrite all steps using a more confident, benefit-focused tone.”
“Shorten each description so it fits on one line without losing meaning.”

Use bulk styling operations in AI Mode to modernize the look and feel:

• update font sizes, hierarchy, and type,
• apply brand-approved colors and themes,
• fix spacing and casing inconsistencies,
• anonymize sensitive or outdated data.

“Update all button labels to match our new product branding.”
“Apply dark mode colors to headings and step titles.”

AI Mode can reorganize your demo's structure to match modern storytelling best practices.

“Restructure this demo so we show value first, setup second, reporting last.”
“Combine Steps 3 and 4 into a single clear step.”
“Add a short intro to set the stage for Chapters 1–3.”

If certain screens no longer match your product, re-capture only the ones you need using Story Capture — with or without narration.

Narration (if used) helps AI Mode regenerate steps aligned to your updated flow.

“Replace these screens with new captures and regenerate the steps using my narration.”

Many legacy demos contain hard-coded details. AI Mode can identify and swap them for variables automatically.

“Find and replace client-specific details with variables where appropriate.”

Optimizing Demos with the AI-Insights Loop

A great demo isn’t a one-and-done asset — it’s a living story that evolves as your product, messaging, and audience change. The most effective teams run a recurring review loop powered by InsightsAI + AI Mode, ensuring every demo stays sharp, accurate, and conversion-ready.

This cadence turns every demo into a continuously improving asset, not a static file.

Why a Maintenance Cadence Matters

Even your best demos drift over time because:

• Product releases introduce new features and UX patterns.
• Messaging, ICP focus, and GTM motions evolve.
• Personas and value props shift across segments and industries.
• Viewer behavior reveals new friction points and questions.

Without a review rhythm, demo quality slowly declines. With an AI-Insights loop, quality compounds.

Start in InsightsAI or Walnut Insights to review performance signals, such as:

• Screens or steps with high drop-off,
• Low-engagement chapters or sections,
• Overlong or unclear copy,
• Steps viewers frequently skip, and
• CTAs that underperform.

InsightsAI highlights where viewers struggle and often why the story isn’t landing.

Turn those signals into a targeted update plan. Decide whether you need to:

• shorten or clarify specific steps,
• reorder the flow to show value earlier,
• strengthen intros, transitions, or CTAs,
• add persona- or vertical-specific variants, or
• re-capture screens that no longer match the product UI.

Use AI Mode to turn every insight into an actionable change. Example prompts:

“Tighten the copy on Steps 2 and 3 — viewers are dropping off here.” “Rewrite the opening to highlight value earlier for first-time admins.” “Add a stronger CTA to the final step focused on starting a free trial.” “Shorten all steps by ~20% to keep everything scannable.”

AI Mode translates your observations into structural, copy, and styling updates in just a few prompts.

If parts of the demo are visually outdated, you don’t need to rebuild from scratch. Instead:

• Use Update Screen to re-capture only the affected screens.
• Let AI Mode regenerate or adjust the steps to match the updated flow.

“Regenerate guide steps for screens 1.3, 1.4 and 1.5."

Run a quick pre-publish QA in AI Mode before shipping the refreshed demo:

“Before we publish, check for long steps, repeated phrases, and inconsistent capitalization. Fix what you find and confirm we’re ready to publish.”

Once the updates look good, publish with your existing template defaults.

Recommended Maintenance Cadence

High-performing demo teams treat maintenance as a recurring GTM ritual:

The Outcome

With a consistent AI-Insights maintenance cadence, your demo library:

• stays aligned with your latest product and GTM strategy,
• reflects real buyer behavior and feedback,
• gets more effective with every iteration, and
• requires less manual effort to maintain over time.

This is how mature teams treat demos as living GTM assets, not static files.

Best Practices for Running an AI-First Demo Program

• Lead with intent, not step-by-step instructions. Tell AI the outcome, value narrative, or persona you’re targeting — it already understands the UI, template structure, and editor tools.
• Capture context-rich workflows with voice + screens. Story Capture provides AI with narrative, semantics, and user flow context, leading to stronger, GTM-ready guided stories.
• Iterate in tight loops. Rapid micro-adjustments outperform long rewrite cycles, helping Sales, CS, and Marketing ship polished demos faster.
• Create standardized “house prompts” for GTM alignment. Lock in tone, messaging frameworks, objections, industry flavors, and persona stories so your entire team stays consistent.
• Start every strategic or customer-facing demo with AI. Begin with AI Mode to ensure best practices, clarity, and messaging are baked in from the first draft — not added at the end.
• Modernize legacy demos with AI, not manual rebuilds. Use AI Mode + EditsAI to overhaul outdated flows, update messaging, restyle content, and bring older demos up to current standards in minutes.
• Continuously refresh your demo library. Keep assets aligned to new product releases, ICP shifts, and GTM motions using AI-driven rewrites and restructuring.
• Use Insights data to close the feedback loop. Identify friction points, high-impact moments, and content gaps — then return to AI Mode to optimize narrative flow, CTAs, and story clarity based on real viewer behavior.

The Big Picture: AI Mode Isn’t a Shortcut — It’s the Standard

With Walnut's AI Mode, you’re not speeding up the old way of building demos — you’re redefining it.

AI becomes the foundation for what great looks like:

• Lightning-fast builds without the busywork
• Storytelling that snaps into place with purpose
• Formatting that stays clean, consistent, and on-brand
• Personalization woven directly into the creation flow
• A unified voice and tone across every demo, every time
• A feedback loop fueled by real viewer behavior

This is what vibe coding for demos truly means:

Build Bigger, Build Better

Explore more guides to level up your skills and unlock even more ways to build with Walnut:

• AI Mode is Coming: And It’s About to Change Everything 🤖
• Guide to Creating Interactive Product Experiences in Walnut
• Walnut Impact & ROI Playbook: Turning Demo Engagement into Measurable Business Outcomes
• Walnut Full-Funnel Analysis Quick Start Guide
• The Complete Guide to Mobile-Friendly Demos