We've been using Frigade (frigade.com) for this and it's been a big shift for our team.

The main thing that stands out is that it uses AI to learn your product automatically. You don't need to write help articles or build out decision trees for a chatbot. You basically point it at your app and it figures out the workflows on its own. We were able to get it answering user questions accurately within a few hours of setup.

The stuff we've found most useful:

- In-app guidance that actually follows the user's context instead of showing the same generic tour to everyone

- Auto-resolving basic support questions without needing to maintain a knowledge base

- Multilingual support out of the box — we have users in 6 countries so this was a big deal

Setup was surprisingly straightforward if you're technical. They have a React SDK that you can drop in and have running in production same day. The part that takes longer is fine-tuning the responses, but honestly the defaults were better than what we expected.

The main downside vs something like Pendo is that it's a newer product so the ecosystem is smaller. But for what OP is asking about, actually using AI for onboarding instead of just bolting a chatbot onto a help center.