AI adoption is rising fast—and not just in the usual places. According to McKinsey’s March 2025 Global Survey, 71% of organizations now report regular use of generative AI in at least one business function. The top five areas seeing adoption are marketing and sales, product and service development, IT, service operations, and knowledge management. But there’s growing interest in new, more strategic use cases—like product discovery, onboarding, and evaluation.
A familiar pain point drives this interest: evaluating new solutions is a high-effort process for many organizations — especially those in industries with strict data security and compliance requirements. It often involves sharing sensitive or anonymized data, running a proof of concept (POC) involving engineering, and navigating a lengthy vendor review. These hurdles extend the time it takes to answer a critical question: “Will this product work for us?”
Expectations have shifted. Today, people don’t just want to hear how a product works—they want to see it in action. They want their use case, their logic, and their context reflected in the product but without the setup or the wait.
That’s what we set out to solve for our real-time decisioning and analytics product, PubNub Illuminate. We wanted a faster, safer way to show what Illuminate can do and, more importantly, how it could work for our customers—without needing their data, time from their engineers, or a drawn-out approval process.
A custom demo in seconds—powered by AI
We need a way to generate mock data that matches the customer’s use case and mimics how their application behaves. Then, we need to automatically create the Illuminate product resources—like mapped fields, metrics, conditions, and actions—that bring that use case to life in the product. Finally, we need to run a demo in a way that feels seamless and real-time.
That led us to build a lightweight feature aptly named Generate Custom Demo. It’s a self-service tool in Illuminate that uses AI to answer questions and create a working demo tailored to the user’s use case.
Right now, in its minimum viable product (MVP) stage, the flow is simple:
Answer four questions about your industry, use case, and what you want to do.
Your answers are sent to GPT-4.
GPT generates mock data specific to your use case.
It creates the Illuminate product resources with mapped data fields and key metrics, builds a decision table, and spins up a real-time dashboard.
You click Run Demo to see it in action.
From there, you can adjust the generated demo resources and perform actions like editing or adding rules, creating new metrics or showing all, and adding charts to the dashboard, as if you’re already live.
You don’t have to upload your data. You don’t need engineering support. You don’t have to go through a vendor security review. You just see it. And if you’re a product manager or developer evaluating solutions, that’s a big deal.
Why is this AI use case different? Most AI features today are assistive, which means they help you write, code, or brainstorm. Those are useful, but this use case goes a bit further.
Instead of helping you think about a solution, it builds a working experience based on your input. This isn’t a chatbot. This isn’t a wall of text telling you what the product could do. Generate Custom Demo is a live, hands-on experience showing what the product does—with a use case that looks like yours.
Keeping it simple…for now This is just the beginning. For this first iteration, we kept it intentionally simple, with all dials set to low. It’s just enough AI to give you a clear, quick glimpse of how Illuminate works in a real-world scenario.
Looking ahead, we're exploring the possibility of letting customers opt-in to advanced functionality. Future versions may automatically detect relevant data from PubNub events, suggest missing fields, and create even more accurate use cases, all powered by advances in large language models.
But for now, we’re focused on making it easy to explore what’s possible with as little friction as possible. Sometimes, the best way to understand a product is to see it working for your use case.
Try it out
If you’re curious about how real-time decisioning can impact your app—whether for moderation, gamification, engagement, or logistics—go to the PubNub Admin Portal, open Illuminate, and click Generate Custom Demo. Then, answer a few questions and see what the AI builds for you.
