Customer onboarding is changing quickly in 2026. AI is suddenly everywhere. Teams are looking for ways to automate more of the work and operate more efficiently in the face of increasingly complex implementations.
But when we surveyed 200 customer onboarding professionals for The State of Customer Onboarding in 2026, we found that some of the hardest parts of onboarding haven’t changed much at all.
Read The State of Customer Onboarding in 2026 →
What we wanted to understand
We went into this research wanting a clearer picture of what customer onboarding actually looks like in 2026.
Where are teams investing? How mature is AI adoption really? What is slowing time to value? How much work are we asking customers to do? And how well can onboarding leaders see what is happening across their portfolio?
The answers gave us a mix of optimism and reality.
Teams are investing in the function and looking for better ways to operate. At the same time, the research points to persistent challenges around customer participation, visibility, complexity, manual work, and the impact a poor onboarding experience can have on retention.
A Very 2026 Onboarding Story
One of the clearest findings in the research is the gap between where teams want to go and what continues to hold them back.
46% of onboarding teams say AI automation is their top priority for the next 12 months. At the same time, 48% say getting customers to engage is still their biggest challenge.
In other words, teams are thinking seriously about agents, automation, and what the next generation of onboarding could look like. Meanwhile, their projects are still getting slowed down because another human being hasn’t done something yet.
That tension runs throughout the report.
Expert Perspectives on Onboarding Trends
We also wanted the report to be useful beyond the numbers.
Alongside the research, we asked experienced onboarding and post-sale leaders Donna Weber, Jeff Kushmerek, Kristi Faltorusso to react to what they saw in the data and provide some practical insights based on the trends.
Their perspectives dig into questions like how to prepare processes for AI, where automation can actually create leverage, and why the technology supporting onboarding still has some catching up to do.
The report also includes a set of 2026 customer onboarding benchmarks, so teams can compare their own timelines, workloads, metrics, stakeholder complexity, and processes against what others are seeing.
See what 200 onboarding professionals told us
The research brings together responses from 200 customer onboarding professionals across 18 industries, from SaaS and FinTech to healthcare, telecommunications, education, logistics, and more.
There are some findings we expected, and a few that surprised us.
And taken together, they paint an interesting picture of a profession trying to move quickly into its AI era while still solving some very human problems.
Explore The State of Customer Onboarding in 2026 →
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- How to Reduce Manual Work in Customer Onboarding – August 31, 2026
- Introducing the State of Customer Onboarding in 2026: All New Report – August 17, 2026
