I've been designing onboarding flows for AI agents for about six months now, and I keep hitting the same wall. Users get through the intro, they understand the value prop, they're ready to try it out, and then we ask for permissions. And that's where everything stops.
I'm watching our analytics and it's brutal. We lose about 40% of users right at the permission grant step. Some of them come back later, but most just... don't. They disappear.
The thing is, we're not asking for anything crazy. We need API access, some basic auth, maybe read access to their files. Pretty standard stuff for what the agent needs to actually do anything useful. But something about that moment where the browser shifts to the permissions dialog, or they have to read through the explanations we've written, just triggers abandonment.
I've tried a few things already. Clearer explanations of why each permission matters. Breaking it into steps instead of one big wall of requests. Even just changing the visual design to feel less "official" and more conversational. Some of it helps a little bit, but we're still losing nearly half our people.
What gets me is that this feels like it should be solvable, right? I work in B2B SaaS, I've done this dance before with different products. You can usually find the friction point and reduce it. But with permissions, it feels different. It's not just friction. It's fear. Users are legitimately nervous about what access means, and I think they should be. That's actually good judgment on their part.
So maybe the problem isn't the design. Maybe it's that we're asking for too much permission by default. Or maybe the entire permission model is just broken for consumer-facing AI tools, and we need to think about it differently.
I've been reading some of the model benchmarks people keep sharing (yeah, I saw that thread), and honestly I'm wondering if I'm just solving the wrong problem. Like, we're optimizing the onboarding experience, but what users really want is probably just to not have to think about permissions at all. Maybe we should be focusing on giving the agent fewer permissions by default and letting users grant more granularly as they discover new features. Or maybe just being so transparent about what the agent does that the permission step feels like a natural extension.
I don't know. I'm a bit tired of redesigning the same flow. Part of me wonders if it's time to escalate this to product and say, "Hey, maybe the permission model itself is the problem, not how we're explaining it." But I also worry that sounds like I'm giving up.
Anyone else hitting this? Curious how other teams are handling permission adoption with AI tools. Not looking for a miracle fix, just wondering if I'm alone in watching people bail at this exact step.