I recently attended Qualtrics’ The Future of XM event, where CEO Jason Maynard and Founder and Executive Chairman Ryan Smith laid out their vision and roadmap for what they see as the next generation of Experience Management.
I’ve followed Qualtrics for about ten years now and have watched it steadily evolve from a survey software vendor with a market research arm into an enterprise platform that connects experience signals (X-data) with operational realities (O-data) to drive real-time business actions.
Over that period, to my mind, Qualtrics largely operated with two distinct engines: real-time listening through Voice of Customer (VoC) and Voice of the Employee (VoE) on one side, and market research on the other.
Now, while both sides of the business ultimately listen to customers (and employees), they tend to operate on different time arcs.
For example, the real-time listening arm aims to capture experiential and operational feedback so that customer feedback, requests for help, and complaints can be addressed in near real time.
Meanwhile, the market research arm is built for strategic depth and aims to gather audience insights over weeks or months to help shape things like product design, brand positioning, and pricing strategies.
What this has meant is that market research has rarely benefited from the speed of experiential and operational listening, and vice versa.
From Synthetic Panels to Faster Decisions
Over the past year, however, that started to change when Qualtrics announced it was using synthetic data and consumer behavior models to build synthetic personas for hypothesis testing.
In a podcast recorded at X4 in March of this year, Ali Henriques, Executive Director of Market Research at Qualtrics, explained how they have built synthetic panels, or simulations, trained on 95% real, anonymized, aggregated human survey data across 20+ industries, which will allow research teams to run counterfactual 'what if' scenarios, specifically in the realm of likelihood to purchase, appeal of a new product, or the attractiveness of a service package.
Now, instead of waiting weeks to coordinate human panels, teams can screen dozens of concepts in hours, narrowing down options before spending a single penny on live field testing.
Qualtrics is not alone in pioneering this shift. In another recent podcast interview, Sri Narasimhan, VP of Enterprise CX and Insights at CVS Health, explained to me how they had developed "agentic twins” - individualised decision-making profiles built from behavioral data and consent-based interviews, which has allowed them to run simulations, collapse testing timelines, significantly accelerate time-to-market for new campaigns and products, eliminate respondent fatigue, and unlock hard-to-reach populations.
However, what made the announcements at The Future of XM session so interesting was Qualtrics’ commitment to take these simulation capabilities out of the research domain and embed them directly into its enterprise platform so that they can be leveraged in real-time.
Their ultimate goal is to help clients increase the lifetime of their customers by bridging The Experience Gap, i.e. the discrepancy between what customers expect and what brands actually deliver.
That gap, Qualtrics estimates, amounts to close to $3 trillion in sales at risk every year due to poor customer experiences.
The problem is that when a poor experience occurs, most organizations cannot respond quickly enough because the technology needed to understand and act in real time has not been available.
Simulate, Predict, and Act
Qualtrics is aiming to remedy the issue, and from 2027, when these new capabilities become available, their clients will be able to:
