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Banto started as a place to host fun multiplayer games: trivia nights, hot takes, quick party formats. That DNA is still in the product. The room code, the host screen, phones in everyone's hands, real-time reveals.
But the team using Banto today looks different. Facilitators, trainers, program owners, and customer success leads do not always walk in asking for a "game." They walk in asking for a live session: something engaging enough that people actually participate, structured enough that the meeting has a point.
That is the shift we are making explicit: from party games to live experiences for real audiences.
Where we are heading vs. what works today
The north star: an AI agent that can eventually design and build fully custom live experiences from a description. You describe the session you need (audience, goals, flow, tone), and Banto produces something purpose-built for that room, not just a reskin of an existing game.
The MVP today: pick a proven template (trivia, voting, drawing, word puzzles, and more), then use AI to customize the content inside it: prompts, questions, titles, styling, and themed copy. The structure of the session comes from the template. You are not designing new game mechanics in chat yet.
That is intentional. Templates keep sessions reliable enough to run in front of a sales team, a classroom, or a customer cohort on day one. The agent work we are doing now is about getting template selection and content customization right before we expand into custom flows and logic.
If you want the full breakdown of what Studio AI can edit today, see our Studio v1.0 beta overview.
What changed in how we think about the product
Early Banto was optimized for speed and delight. Describe a vibe, get a playable format, host it tonight.
What we heard next was more operational:
- "I need onboarding that does not put new hires to sleep."
- "Can we run a certification quiz after partner training?"
- "My class already uses slides. I want something they do on their phones."
- "We have a cohort kickoff. I need energy, but also coverage of the actual material."
Same underlying mechanics (prompts, votes, reveals, leaderboards). Different intent. Different stakes.
So we reframed the product around audience sessions: live moments where a host runs the room and everyone else contributes from their device. Sometimes that is playful. Often it is professional. The platform does not care, as long as the format fits the room.
Who this is for now
We are building for teams that run live programs, not only social hosts. That includes:
Classroom and education
Review games, exit tickets, vocabulary rounds, test prep. Teachers and facilitators who want participation without rebuilding their whole curriculum in a new tool.
Sales training
Objection handling, product knowledge drills, scenario-based quizzes. Reps practice, vote on strong answers, and see why the best response works.
Learning & development (L&D)
Policy training, compliance refreshers, culture and values scenarios. Formats that support discussion, not just a slide deck and silence.
Partner enablement
Certification checks, product updates, competitive positioning practice. Partners join from anywhere, no install required.
Customer success onboarding
Welcome flows, implementation milestones, "did you actually read the docs" checks dressed up as something tolerable. New customers learn your product in a session that feels live, not like homework.
Program management
Cohort kickoffs, workshop segments, conference icebreakers, retros, all-hands moments. Program owners need something reusable and fast, because the next session is always next week.
If you run live programs for a group, you are the audience we have in mind.
The old way vs. where we are going
Before (party-game mental model):
- Pick a game type
- Hope the theme fits
- Customize manually or start over
- Mostly social use cases
Today (MVP):
- Start from the job to be done (onboard, certify, review, energize a room)
- Describe it in plain language on Create
- AI selects a template and themes the content (questions, prompts, copy, styling)
- Preview as host and participant, publish, run the session
- Reopen and iterate for the next cohort
Tomorrow (north star):
- Describe a custom live experience end to end
- AI designs session flow and interaction patterns, not only content inside a fixed format
- Still hosted in the browser, still low friction for participants, but less constrained by which templates exist today
You are not learning game design today. You are describing an outcome and getting a runnable session on a proven format. The long-term bet is that the same agent gets you to formats we have not shipped yet.
"Vibecode" the content, template picks the format
A lot of creators want the vibecoding feeling: describe what you want, see it appear, tweak in conversation.
That is how Studio works right now, within the MVP scope. You chat (or pick a premade prompt), the AI picks a template, then fills it with your topic: questions, prompts, labels, and visual styling. You can iterate in chat until the content feels right.
What you cannot do yet is ask the agent to invent a wholly new session structure from scratch. Custom game logic and novel interaction patterns still live in template source or the Banto CLI for authors who want to go further. The agent path to fully custom experiences is what we are building toward.
Examples of prompts that map cleanly to today's MVP:
- "Create a partner certification quiz on our Q2 product changes."
- "Build a customer onboarding game covering setup, billing, and support escalation."
- "Make a classroom exit ticket for today's biology unit on cell organelles."
- "Run a program kickoff icebreaker, then a short culture quiz for the new cohort."
Premade categories on Create (Icebreakers, Training, Classroom, Team Building, Events, Social Games) exist because these jobs show up constantly. You can still write a fully custom prompt, but the agent will still route you to a template and customize inside it.
Why live sessions beat another slide deck
Slides are fine for broadcasting information. They are weak at checking understanding, surfacing disagreement, and making a room feel like one room.
Live sessions on Banto give you:
- Participation by default: everyone has an input surface (their phone or laptop)
- A shared moment: reveals, votes, and leaderboards land at the same time
- Low friction for attendees: join with a code, no account required for participants
- Repeatability: save the experience, rerun it for the next cohort, iterate in Studio
For L&D and CS onboarding, that means you can run the same structured session every month without rebuilding from zero. For sales and partner teams, it means practice that feels active, not performative.
What we are still honest about
This is a product in motion. We have not replaced every workshop format or LMS on earth.
Today: template pick + content customization. Strongest on questions, prompts, titles, and styles.banto.css. Not on rewriting .banto session logic in chat.
Next: better template matching for training and classroom scenarios, more premade prompts for professional use cases, higher success rate when you describe a session in one shot.
Later: an agent that can propose and implement custom live experiences, including bounded edits to session flow, not just themed content inside a fixed format.
The name on the tin still says "game" in places
You might see legacy language around games in older copy or repo names. Under the hood, the runtime is the same. The positioning is what changed: we are a live session builder for facilitators, trainers, and program teams, with party-night energy when you want it.
If you used Banto for trivia with friends, that still works. If you are rolling out partner enablement this quarter, that is now the story we tell on purpose.
Try it for your next session
- Go to banto.tv/create
- Describe the session you need (audience, topic, tone)
- Open Studio, preview as host and participant
- Publish and run it with your group
Whether you are onboarding customers, certifying partners, or running Friday's class review, the goal is the same: a live experience people actually join, built in minutes instead of days.
Party games taught us how to make rooms feel alive. Live sessions are where we apply that to work that matters.