How AIQ built an AI-powered product knowledge engine on LaunchNotes
AIQ powers modern customer loyalty and engagement for brands and retailers. Its platform turns fragmented customer data into personalized experiences across every touchpoint: marketing, loyalty programs, mobile apps, digital shopping, owned ecommerce and a growing retail ad network.
LaunchNotes as AI infrastructure
Most companies use LaunchNotes to communicate product updates. AIQ also uses it as the backbone of its internal AI tooling.
AIQ connected the LaunchNotes MCP server to its AI tools, and it works in both directions. It's the write layer that drafts release notes into LaunchNotes, and the read layer that pulls them back out to answer questions.
On the writing side, AIQ built custom Claude skills that pull details from Intercom, ClickUp, Slack and GitHub, keep AIQ's brand tone, and write a complete draft announcement directly into LaunchNotes. What used to take 3 to 4 hours now takes under 45 minutes, including editing and screenshots: 80% less time spent on release notes, and no release gets missed, however small. “It’s saved us so much time and money,” Kevin said.
On the reading side, AIQ built an internal AI bot. Ask it about any product capability and it searches LaunchNotes for a matching announcement, then returns a summary and a direct link to the updates page. AIQ is extending it to customers next.
That's the flywheel: every release note, categorized at publish time, becomes a fact an AI can retrieve on demand. Good categorization used to pay off once, when the note went out. Now it pays off every time someone asks a question.
The LaunchNotes MCP server let us build AI skills perfectly tailored to how we work. The difference is night and day.
Kevin Bowman, Sr. Product Manager, AIQ
Before: several product lines, no consistent process
Kevin Bowman joined Dispense in 2021, moved from Customer Success into product, and came over to AIQ in the acquisition.
After the acquisition, AIQ was running product communications across several product lines with no consistent approach. Dispense manually maintained distribution groups in an email tool to send release notes. The broader AIQ platform kept its changelog on a help documentation page customers had to find on their own. Neither scaled.
Customers weren't adopting new features because they didn't know they existed. And there was no one place, internal or external, to see what had changed.
In-app announcements helped for major releases, but they were marketing-focused, skipped smaller releases and bug fixes, and needed Engineering every time.
Nobody had visibility into our releases, and everyone was frustrated. Customer Success and Sales felt unprepared, and customers felt like they weren’t seeing progress.
Kevin Bowman, Sr. Product Manager, AIQ
The breaking point: a key customer ran out of patience
It came to a head when a large multi-site operator (MSO), one of AIQ's most important customer segments, ran out of patience.
The MSO needed standard operating procedures in place across dozens of retail locations before any update went live. When functionality changed unexpectedly, it wasn't an inconvenience. It was an operational problem that cascaded across their whole network.
After hearing their leadership team’s frustrations, we knew we had to act fast. We signed with LaunchNotes and were live before our next release.
Kevin Bowman, Sr. Product Manager, AIQ
AIQ was live within days, with a header matched to its brand and past release notes migrated and backdated from the old help page. That MSO stayed, kept renewing, and added locations as it expanded, eventually operating across 5 states.
The results: from single-digit views to 50%+ open rates
AIQ's first LaunchNotes announcements hit a 40%+ open rate. As the team segmented release notes by category and product, it climbed past 50%.
We went from single-digit weekly views on a help page to emailing thousands of customers with open rates above 50%.
Kevin Bowman, Sr. Product Manager, AIQ
Adoption followed. Store-level rollout of new features, which used to take weeks or more, now happens within days of release: 85% faster feature adoption. Questions about what shipped have nearly disappeared: in one recent two-month window, AIQ's Customer Success team was asked about a shipped feature exactly once.
- Customer Success and Support link release notes in customer conversations
- Sales shows prospects a living record of shipping velocity
- Marketing uses announcements as the starting point for bigger launches
- Leadership found an unexpected use: investor conversations
Our leadership says it’s become one of the easiest ways to show investors our progress.
Kevin Bowman, Sr. Product Manager, AIQ
Every release note is now an answer
AIQ started with a simple goal: stop missing releases and make sure customers knew what shipped. Now every release note does double duty. It informs customers the day it goes out, and it feeds the AI tools that answer their questions long after.
Writing release notes finally feels purposeful. It’s a lot easier to put in the time when you know people will actually read them.
Kevin Bowman, Sr. Product Manager, AIQ
