Last week, I attended Qualtrics’ annual customer event, X4, and this year it was different.
It was different, not because it was in a new location – it was in Seattle this year, instead of Salt Lake City, where it has been held for the past couple of years.
Or, because they have a new CEO in place – Jason Maynard only took on the role in February this year.
It was different because, unlike other technology vendor events, there were no major new product announcements or demos on the main stage.
Now, I’m not saying that Qualtrics didn’t announce anything at the event.
They did, and in fact announced a bunch of new AI-powered innovations focused on improving the customer and employee experience, as well as market research, and closing what Maynard described in his opening keynote as the experience gap, i.e. the gap between insights and action.
These included:
- New enhancements to their platform that make it easy to bring contact center data into the platform, making what was previously an enterprise-only capability accessible to organizations of all sizes in weeks instead of months, as well as new social listening features that can instantly integrate feedback from Facebook and Instagram.
- New AI-powered automated text analytics capabilities that will allow the traditionally labor-intensive tasks of building topic models, tagging verbatims, and validating taxonomies to be done in hours instead of weeks, helping teams respond swiftly to what matters most.
- Experience Agents, which can proactively resolve issues before they escalate. Although these are only available in preview at the moment.
- Synthetic panels, or in other words, a consumer behavior prediction model built using real market research data from customers, that is designed to allow organizations to simulate how consumers might respond to research questions. This provides teams with a way to test concepts, messaging, and product decisions within hours instead of weeks, at half the cost of human panels. The synthetic panel for US consumers is now live, with plans to launch synthetic panels for the UK and Ireland, Canada, as well as Australia and New Zealand in the first half of 2026.
However, returning to the shift in focus for the event, I asked Brad Anderson, President of Products, Engineering, User Experience, and Security at Qualtrics, about it in a podcast interview I recorded at the event.
In true “eat your own dog food” fashion, Anderson explained that after last year’s X4, Qualtrics asked its customers for feedback, and discovered that customers wanted to see fewer product-focused presentations and more customer stories.
In short, customers said they wanted to hear stories that would inspire them and give them something to aspire to.
Anderson admitted that, as a "product guy," this pivot was personally difficult for him, resulting in the first keynote he had ever given without doing a single product demo.
He added that their shift in focus was influenced by the maturing of their customer base, with an increasing number of the ‘early majority,’ in Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations language, being ready and able to embrace the full scope of Experience Management.
This feels like an eminently sensible move and matches other insights I hear from the market, which suggest that although brands are enthusiastic about all the technology and capabilities emerging, many of them are simply not yet ready to take advantage of these new innovations.
In fact, I have heard some brands say that, often, when they attend tech vendor events, it can feel like trying to board a bus that’s just out of reach and speeding away into the distance.
But the truth is that you can only go as far and as fast as your customers are willing to go.
Yes, you can nudge, encourage, and even cajole them a little. But ultimately, it’s their journey. So, Qualtrics’ decision to shift the focus of their event feels like a smart move.