It's a Wednesday afternoon in March. Admitted student day is six weeks out. Your schedule exists, sort of. It's spread across a Google Doc, a shared spreadsheet from the registrar, and three email threads with session leaders who keep changing their room requests.

You open Builder. You know what comes next.

Reformatting. Copy-pasting. Column-matching. The kind of work that has nothing to do with why you took this job.

We've been building to fix exactly that. Over the last several months, the Guidebook team has shipped a set of updates designed to remove the setup friction that quietly consumes orientation and admissions teams every cycle. Here's what's live, what's coming, and what it means for the events you're already running.

Want to see the full walkthrough? Watch the on-demand recording of our product update webinar here.

The part of guide-building nobody talks about

You're good at this work. You've run admitted student day. You've built orientation schedules for thousands of incoming students. You know how to use Guidebook.

And you still spend more time than you should reformatting your schedule data, chasing session details, and coaxing your communications to look professional before they hit a student's inbox.

That's not a skills problem. It's a setup problem.

Many orientation teams describe spending more hours reformatting their schedule spreadsheet than they do thinking about the student experience it represents. The event itself, the sessions, the connections, the moments that make a first-year student feel like they belong, gets compressed into whatever time is left after the logistics are handled.

That's what these updates are designed to change. Not what you do. Just how much of your time it takes to get there.

What's live now

What is Guidebook's AI schedule import, and how does it work?

Guidebook's AI schedule import is a feature that reads your existing schedule data, in whatever format it currently lives in, and converts it into a structured, ready-to-publish Guidebook schedule. Upload a PDF, Word document, CSV, Excel file, or plain text document. The AI parses the content, maps it to the correct session fields, and gives you a preview before anything goes live. Review it, approve it, or download the generated CSV to fill gaps manually. No reformatting. No template matching before you upload.

Gulnaar Kaur, Guidebook's Group Product Manager, describes the intent plainly: "If you can get your schedule into the guide as quickly and easily as possible, then you can think more about how do you showcase sponsors or what notifications do you want to schedule ahead of time to engage and re-engage your communities."

That's the trade the feature is making. Fifteen minutes of upload and review in exchange for the hours you'd otherwise spend on column formatting.

A few practical details worth knowing:

• You don't need complete data to start. If session locations aren't confirmed yet, upload what you have. The AI exports what it can into a CSV, fill the gaps there, then reimport using the session ID numbers the system generates.
• Updating is additive by default. Reimporting doesn't overwrite your existing schedule. Sessions with IDs get updated; sessions without IDs get added as new. Export first, edit the CSV, reimport.
• You can always opt out. Institutions with AI use policies, or teams that simply prefer the traditional import template, can continue using the legacy method. The AI import is an option, not a requirement. "We're not forcing you to use the AI," Gulnaar confirmed on the webinar. "There may also be policies at your institutions that prevent you from using AI, or maybe you just don't want to. That's totally fine."

Email modernization, communications your students will actually open

Here's a small admission: Guidebook's outgoing emails didn't look great before this update. Link-heavy formatting. Not responsive across devices. The kind of email design we're all trained to treat with suspicion before clicking anything.

That's changed. Emails from Guidebook are now branded, polished, and fully responsive, meaning they render cleanly whether a student opens them on a laptop in the library or on their phone between classes. Katelyn Martin, Guidebook's Product Designer, was direct about the old design: "Emails before, I'll be honest, looked a little suspicious. We're all being trained not to click emails like this."

For admissions teams, this matters more than it might seem. Every email that touches an admitted student between March and May is a yield communication. The moment a student hesitates, or worse, marks something as spam, is a belonging signal going the wrong direction.

The update rolls out automatically. Your guides don't need to be reconfigured. Keep them published and up to date, and the new email design applies.

App UI refresh, cleaner, faster, built for the device in their hand

Guidebook is in the middle of a full app modernization, a page-by-page redesign that brings the experience in line with how students actually use their phones in 2026.

What's live now: the app home screen, the sign-up flow, and the login page have all been redesigned. First impressions, the screens a student sees before they've even found your guide, are cleaner, more intuitive, and more accessible.

What's coming very soon: guide navigation, general info pages, and the schedule view. The schedule redesign in particular is built around scannability, students should be able to open the app, find their next session, and get moving without squinting at a dense list.

The design philosophy, as Katelyn described it, isn't redesigning for the sake of redesigning: bigger touch zones, stronger contrast, better use of screen real estate. "We're improving accessibility," she noted. "Making it easier to scan and interact with."

This matters for your students and for the families navigating your admitted student day app alongside them. It also matters for your team. Guidebook has always been a mobile app, not a website squeezed onto a phone. This redesign is what keeps that true on the device in their hand.

What's coming: the roadmap window

Three things worth watching as the year continues.

Third-party integrations. Sarah Tulkki, Guidebook's Head of Engineering, confirmed the team is actively working on integrations that will let orientation and admissions teams pull their existing institutional data directly into Guidebook, without manual re-entry. The goal, as she described it, is letting teams "leverage their existing data and their existing systems within Guidebook in a seamless experience." No details on specific systems yet, but the direction is clear: less data migration, more continuity.

AI beyond the schedule. The schedule import is the first AI feature, not the last. Gulnaar was specific about where the team is looking next: bringing AI tooling to non-schedule content (custom lists, resources), helping teams make better sense of their engagement data, and building what she described as a "recommendation engine" inside Builder, contextual suggestions for how to promote your app, configure your notifications, and structure your content. None of this is confirmed on the roadmap yet. What is confirmed is that the team is actively collecting feedback to shape what comes next.

Builder modernization. The admin-side Builder interface is overdue for a refresh, and the team knows it. Gulnaar was candid: "Builder, honestly, is old." The goal isn't a disorienting overhaul, it's fewer clicks to accomplish the things you do most, with features that are currently buried in menus brought to the surface.

The deliberate AI question, and why it matters for your campus

Every platform is adding AI features right now. Some of them are useful. A lot of them are noise.

For orientation and admissions teams specifically, the AI question carries weight it doesn't carry in other industries. Your institutions are navigating internal AI use policies. Your students are Gen Z, the most AI-native generation, and also the most skeptical of experiences that feel automated rather than intentional. And the work you do, building the moments that make a first-year student decide to enroll, arrive, and stay, is fundamentally human work.

The setup that surrounds that work is where automation earns its place.

Gulnaar articulated Guidebook's position clearly during the webinar: "AI is a powerful tool that should assist you but not replace or remove your human expertise. Your decision making, your taste for what's good." The approach she described, deliberate, not reactive, means Guidebook is asking which parts of guide-building are genuinely time-consuming and mechanical before writing a feature, not adding AI because the market expects it.

That distinction matters when you're choosing technology for your campus. Purdue's orientation team serves 8,000 students per orientation cycle, 75% of their incoming class. At that scale, the question of whether a platform's AI features are genuinely useful or just visually impressive becomes a staffing question.

The opt-in design of Guidebook's AI import, traditional template always available alongside it, is the right call for a higher ed context where institutional AI policies vary widely and team comfort levels vary even more.

What this means for your next orientation build

Less setup. More belonging.

Indiana Tech recovered 375 staff hours annually after moving their admitted student day to Guidebook. Their yield went from 40% to 82%. That wasn't because of the app alone, it was because their team got time back to focus on the experience rather than the logistics.

These updates are built toward the same trade.

The orientation coordinator who used to spend a Wednesday afternoon in March reformatting a schedule CSV now uploads the PDF their registrar sent and reviews a structured schedule in minutes. The admissions director whose May emails now arrive in a student's inbox looking polished and trustworthy, rather than suspicious and link-heavy — has one less reason to wonder whether their admitted students are actually reading what they send.

The time you recover isn't the point. What you do with it is.

The push notification sequence you finally build ahead of time instead of the night before. The gamification leaderboard you turn on because you're not still editing sessions at 11pm. The personalised track you build for your first-gen students because someone on your team had two hours to think about belonging instead of columns.

That's what orientation programs built for new student success look like when the setup gets out of the way.

When you're ready to see the new features in your own guide — talk to your account manager and we'll walk you through what's live and what's coming.

[faq]

Q: What is Guidebook's AI schedule import?

A: Guidebook's AI schedule import reads your existing schedule data (in whatever format it currently lives in) and converts it into a structured, ready-to-publish schedule. Upload a PDF, Word document, CSV, Excel file, or plain text document and the AI maps the content to the correct session fields. You get a preview before anything goes live, and you can download a CSV to fill any gaps manually before importing.

Q: What file types does the AI schedule import support?

A: The AI schedule import supports PDFs, Word documents, Excel files, CSVs, and plain text files. If your schedule data exists in any of these formats, even loosely organised, the tool will do its best to parse and structure it. You don't need to reformat anything to match a template before uploading.

Q: Can I opt out of AI features in Guidebook?

A: Yes. The AI schedule import is an option, not a requirement. When you click import in Builder, you can choose the AI-powered import or the traditional template-based spreadsheet method. Teams at institutions with AI use policies, or those who simply prefer the manual approach, can continue using the legacy import without any loss of functionality.

Q: What changed in Guidebook's email system for higher ed teams?

A: Guidebook's outgoing emails have been redesigned to be branded, fully responsive across devices, and visually polished. The previous format was link-heavy and didn't render well on mobile. That's a real problem when the majority of your admitted students and orientation participants are reading on their phones. The update applies automatically to your existing guides. No reconfiguration needed.

Q: When will the new Guidebook app UI be available for my orientation guide?

A: The modernisation is rolling out page by page throughout 2026. The app home screen, sign-up flow, and login pages are already live. Guide navigation, general info pages, and the schedule view are coming very soon. Guidebook will notify teams by email as each update goes live. If you're not seeing an expected update, reach out to your account manager to confirm your guide is on the latest version.

Q: How is Guidebook's approach to AI different from other event platforms?

A: Guidebook's position is that AI should assist orientation and admissions teams without replacing their judgment. Rather than adding AI features reactively, the team is identifying which parts of guide-building are genuinely time-consuming and mechanical (like schedule formatting) and automating those specifically. Features like the opt-out design of the AI import reflect the reality that higher ed institutions have varying AI use policies and that the humans running these events should stay in control of the decisions that matter.

Q: What Guidebook integrations are coming for higher ed institutions?

A: Guidebook's engineering team is actively working on third-party integrations designed to let orientation and admissions teams pull their existing institutional data directly into the platform without manual re-entry. Specific systems haven't been announced yet. Teams interested in shaping which integrations get prioritised can share feedback through their account manager or by emailing productsuggestions@guidebook.com.

Q: How do I update my orientation schedule after the initial AI import?

A: Reimporting is additive by default: it won't overwrite sessions that already exist. To update existing sessions, export your current schedule from Builder first. The export includes session ID numbers. Edit the CSV with your changes and reimport. Sessions with matching IDs will be updated; sessions without IDs will be added as new. For step-by-step guidance, reach out to the Guidebook support team at support@guidebook.com.

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