We’re excited to introduce Next Lab 2.34.0, bringing a new guided onboarding experience designed to help users get started faster and with more clarity.

🧭 Step-by-step guided tour

We’ve added a new in-app tour that walks you through the key steps to create a session and add a drill. The tour guides you step by step, making it easier to understand the workflow inside the Lab.

🎥 Video-enhanced guidance

Some steps in the tour can include short instructional videos, giving you visual guidance and helping you quickly understand what to do next.

📊 Insights through Mixpanel

All interactions with the tour are now tracked with Mixpanel, allowing us to better understand how users engage with onboarding and identify areas for improvement.

🌐 Full language support

The guided tour automatically adapts to all languages available in the Lab, ensuring a consistent onboarding experience for every user.

🙌 Thanks

Thanks for all the feedback that helped shape this feature.

We’re excited to introduce Next Lab 2.32.0, which includes an experimental (beta) feature to create agendas directly through the IIS chat.

🧪 Session Agenda creation via IIS chat (Beta)

You can now ask the IIS assistant to create an agenda through chat.

This feature is currently in beta, and we’re actively testing how well it fits into real workflows.

We’d love to hear from you:

Does this flow feel intuitive?

Is anything missing or unclear?

What would make agenda creation faster or more useful for you?

Your feedback will help shape how this feature evolves before a full release.

⚠️ Beta notice

Since this is an experimental feature:

You may encounter rough edges or incomplete flows.

We’ll be iterating quickly based on your feedback.

🙌 Share your feedback

Please share your thoughts and suggestions through the Frill boards—we’re excited to learn how this works for you and improve it together!

We’re shipping Release 2.24.0 with a focus on the unglamorous-but-essential stuff: clearer operational signals, safer user onboarding, and a backend upgrade that sets us up for smoother scaling.

This release includes five key improvements:

• Better critical error notifications to Slack
• A tighter review flow for unusual/new users
• Next Cycle Agents moved onto the new queue architecture
• Updates to our user confirmation review process

Below is a quick walkthrough of what changed and why it matters.

1) Clearer critical error reporting (with Slack notifications)

When something breaks, the first job is knowing it broke—and knowing it fast.

In 2.24.0 we improved how critical errors are sent to Slack so alerts are more dependable and easier to act on. That means fewer “silent failures,” less guesswork, and faster time-to-triage when something is genuinely urgent.

Why it matters: better signal → faster response → less downtime.

2) Improved review for strange/new users

We’ve made changes to how we review unusual or newly-created users. The goal is simple: catch edge cases earlier while keeping the process lightweight for the team.

This update helps us identify “doesn’t look right” patterns sooner, while maintaining a consistent, repeatable review workflow.

Why it matters: safer onboarding and fewer support escalations later.

3) Vision and Purpose Agent upgraded to the new queue architecture

One of the bigger internal changes in 2.24.0 is migrating the Next Cycle Agents to our new queue architecture.

Queue systems are the plumbing of many modern apps: they manage background work, smooth out load spikes, and provide a reliable way to process jobs asynchronously. Moving the Next Cycle Agents to the new queue design is an investment in stability and throughput—especially under heavier usage.

Why it matters: improved performance under load and a cleaner foundation for future features.

4) Updated user confirmation review

We also refined the user confirmation review workflow. This is about making confirmations easier to validate and reducing ambiguity during review.

Why it matters: fewer confusing edge cases for reviewers and more consistent decisions.

What to watch after updating

As always, we’ll be keeping an eye on a few areas post-release:

• Slack alert volume and formatting (ensuring signal stays high)
• Any friction in the new/strange user review flow
• Next Cycle Agents job processing latency and retry patterns
• Confirmation review throughput and consistency
• A drop in RecordNotUnique / UniqueViolation occurrences

Release 2.24.0 is about building a smoother, safer, and more reliable platform—incrementally, but meaningfully. If you notice anything unexpected after the update, or if you have ideas for improving these workflows further, we’d love to hear it.

We’re excited to share that version v2.9.1 is now live! This release focuses on improving navigation, team interaction, and chat creation across workspaces.

🔧 What's New

Fixed scroll issue that prevented reaching the last team on the list.

Corrected redirection after accepting/rejecting team invitations or requesting to join a team — now it redirects properly to the Select Index page.

Chat title is now generated when starting a new conversation in Instigator or Leader mode, even if you are not inside a workspace.

Editing a session from the Play page no longer changes the active workspace.

Chart interactions fixed — switching between metric types or chart views won’t cause incorrect redirections or context loss anymore.

✅ Why It Matters

These fixes make the platform:

More stable when navigating across workspaces.

More intuitive when managing teams or sessions.

More reliable when creating or switching chats.

💬 Try it and share your feedback

Feel free to explore the improvements — and if anything doesn’t behave as expected, let us know. Your feedback helps us keep evolving the platform smoothly.

We’re excited to announce that Next Lab version 2.7.0 has officially been released!

🎉 What’s New in This Release?

🤖 AI Assistant in the Next Lab | Instigators Experience

You can now chat with an AI Assistant that helps you find the right drill—faster and smarter.

• Use natural language to describe your needs—no need to know drill names.
• The assistant uses RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) to search our 250+ drill database, surfacing the best-fit options for your situation.
• It can also help you design a full session tailored to a specific subject, problem area, or goal.

Whether you're working on a high-stakes innovation sprint or just looking for a warm-up drill, the AI Assistant has you covered.

📍 You’ll find it inside the Instigators experience. Give it a try and see how quickly it can spark your next session idea.

💬 AI Chat Histories in Instigators and Leaders

You can now view and revisit past chats with the AI Assistant in both Instigators and Leaders. No more losing context—pick up right where you left off.

🛠️ Bug Fixes

We’ve addressed a handful of bugs to make everything a bit smoother and faster.

💡 Example Prompts to Try with the AI Assistant

Here are some example questions to help you get started:

• “I need a drill to help a team prioritize innovation opportunities.”
• “What drill can I use to enhance lateral thinking?”
• “What’s a good drill to find the root cause of a problem?”
• “What’s a good energizer for a group that doesn’t know each other well?”
• “Can you suggest a session structure for tackling regulatory roadblocks in healthcare?”
• “I’m working with a group of first-time leaders—what drills would help them align on purpose?”
• “I want to run a 90-minute workshop focused on breaking assumptions—what should I use?”

As always, thanks for being part of building the future of Next Lab.

On this release:

• Privacy and Cookie Policy: Updated to use new provider keeping the data protection and transparency
• Security Improvement: Secured the implementation of reCAPTCHA to significantly reduce bot sign-up and sign-in attempts
• Error Handling Enhancement: Improved error management for S7 and AI Focus group: Added user-friendly error messaging, prevents loader from getting stuck during AI execution failures, users will now see a "Try again later" message if an error occurs.

On this version:

• Security enhancements
• Asking you to update your information
• Some bug fixes

We are experiencing problems with our MIRO integration. For the time being, we cannot generate new MIRO boards. We suggest you print a PDF of your posters and upload it to your own MIRO board. Thank you for being so patient.

In this video, we show you how to achieve this: