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Building AI-Powered Journey Mapper: From Manual Process to Automated Insights

How AI agents can transform time-intensive customer journey mapping into minutes of automated analysis - plus an open-source tool you can customize yourself

If you’ve ever tried to create a customer journey map, you know the pain. You sit down with good intentions, open up your favorite whiteboard tool, and then... spend the next couple of hours just trying to get the layout right.

By the time you’re done, you’re exhausted and the map is already outdated.

I’ve been there. So I built something different.

The Journey Mapping Problem

Here’s what usually happens when teams try to create journey maps:

You start with research notes scattered across different tools. Then you try to organize everything into a coherent flow. You debate whether "Awareness" comes before "Discovery" or if they’re the same thing. Someone suggests adding emotional states. Now you need different colors and icons.

Two hours later, you have a beautiful map that nobody will update because it’s too much work.

Most teams either skip journey mapping entirely or create maps that become digital dust collectors. The process is just too painful.

What if AI Could Do the Heavy Lifting?

I started wondering: what if you could just describe a customer journey in plain English and have AI create the visual map?

So I built an AI-powered Journey Mapper to test this idea.

You type something like "A customer discovers our eCommerce site through social media, browses products, adds items to cart, gets distracted and abandons it, receives an email reminder, and completes the purchase."

The AI generates a complete journey map with stages, emotional states, and even improvement suggestions.

Demo Time

In the video above, I walk through the entire tool. You’ll see how it works in real-time, including some of the editing features I built in.

What I found interesting is that the AI doesn’t just create a generic template. It actually analyzes your specific scenario and suggests relevant touchpoints and emotions. For the e-commerce example, it picked up on cart abandonment and suggested email remarketing strategies.

Pretty cool, right?

How I Built This

This was a fun technical challenge. The core is built around natural language processing that understands journey descriptions and maps them to visual components.

I used Replit’s agent capabilities for the AI integration, built in user authentication, and added a credit system to manage API costs. The whole thing is designed to be remixed and customized.

The best part? It’s open source. If you want to build on it or adapt it for your specific needs, you can.

Try It Yourself

Want to test it out?

Live Demo: Customer Journey Mapper

Just log in with your Replit account and you get 10 free credits to start. You can describe any customer journey and see what the AI creates.

Want to Customize It?

The template is available on Replit Gallery: Journey Mapper Template

You can remix it and add your own features. I’ve already seen a few people customize it for different industries, which is exactly what I was hoping for.

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Why This Matters

This isn’t just about journey mapping. It’s about removing friction from important product work.

How many times have you skipped doing something valuable because the tooling was too complex? Customer interviews, competitive analysis, user research synthesis... there are so many areas where AI can handle the grunt work so we can focus on insights and strategy.

I think we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible when you combine AI capabilities with product management workflows.

What’s Next?

I’m curious to see how people use this tool and what they build on top of it.

If you try it out, let me know what you think. What worked? What didn’t? What would you add?

And if you remix the template into something new, definitely share it. I love seeing how people adapt these experiments for their own use cases.

The goal is to keep experimenting with AI tools that solve real problems for product teams. This Journey Mapper is just one example of what becomes possible when we stop thinking about AI as magic and start thinking about it as a really powerful productivity tool.

What customer journey would you want to map first?

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