Qualtrics Innovation, Technology & Agility

What is the unique story that you feel your company has with AI? If you were writing about it, what would the title of your blog be?
We’ve been pioneering AI/ML within our category of experience management software for quite some time; the more recent GenAI wave has accelerated our efforts here. Our focus is on creating and developing capabilities that build customer and employee connections. These connections are what give companies a competitive edge, and it makes Qualtrics’s story pretty unique in a loud AI market.

A potential title could be “How AI powers world-class experience management” or even “Using AI to improve the human experience.”

Our company mission is to improve the human experience. That requires experience management — a purposeful design and development of experiences. AI, enabled with the right information, accelerates the ability to do that. Our AI solution helps our customers discover blind spots, identify the next trends, foster loyalty and enables them to take action in the moment while prioritizing security and privacy. Putting them — and us — on the road to making those improvements in the human experience.

What are you most excited about in the field of AI right now?
I’ve been most excited by the pace at which the state and capabilities of the technology are evolving rapidly. And with that we at Qualtrics are constantly thinking about how to evolve our software offering to best take advantage of these innovations and deliver even more value to our customers.

For example, at X4 we announced our entrance into experience agents: digital workers to help manage and resolve experience management issues. They’re the next era of XM and are extending the value of Qualtrics and XM, so it’s easy to be excited about their role in the market.
It’s been exciting to be building on top of the latest frontier models like OpenAI ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s LlaMA and more, leveraging large language models while evolving the state of experience management.

We’ve also been rapidly adopting and building with AI dev tools, seeing unprecedented productivity uplift with the use of code generation tools. Internally, we’ve been rapidly evolving our own internal dev tooling, having built over 20 internal apps to assist with trend analysis, issue analysis, development, testing and modeling.

AI is a constantly evolving field. Very few people coming into these roles have years of experience to pull from. Explain what continuous learning looks like on your team. How do you learn from one another and collaborate?
We’ve been actively working to upskill our current and incoming talent through a variety of learning and development activities.

Broadly, the Qualtrics team is hands-on in our own AI playground. We want the team to be confident with what AI can do and be pushing the boundaries of their own work through the use of AI.

In 2024 we brought onboard Gurdeep Singh Pall as our first-ever president, AI strategy. He brought with him over 30 years of experience creating new products and solutions with AI technologies. He spearheaded, among other things, Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, and in his time here has led AI strategy, including our recent entrance into experience agents.
Here in R&D we’re constantly actively hiring for the best talent in AI/ML.

Internally, we’ve also been running maximum likelihood estimation programs which aim to integrate ML engineers into our existing scrum teams, upskilling secure data exchanges.

We’re also constantly experimenting and learning. We run annual AI summits, bringing together hackathon-style demos and discussions, and we also run regular hackathons in engineering.