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Qualtrics releases employee, customer service AI agents
Qualtrics joins the agentic AI free-for-all in CX.
For those who had Qualtrics autonomous agents on their 2025 enterprise IT bingo cards, congratulations.
Today, Qualtrics previewed its agentic AI tool set, Experience Agents, slated for release in the second half of this year. Also in preview is Synthetic Research, a generative AI testing tool that can show the potential reception of a user's new products and services.
Experience Agents draws on a Qualtrics user's data from surveys, call center chats, online reviews and other sources to measure customer and employee sentiment. Agents can take further steps to diagnose issues happening during customer interactions. Users can empower the agents to solve customer problems by doing things like offering refunds or loyalty points according to brand guidelines.
Qualtrics will roll out its agent platform at a time when vendors including Salesforce, Google, Oracle, ServiceNow, OpenAI and Microsoft also have autonomous agent platforms.
The market might be getting crowded, but there's still room for vendors to introduce tools that automate HR, customer service and contact center issues, said Lou Reinemann, an analyst at IDC.
"Previously, [AI has] not been very good. It's been either hallucinations or just bad grammar or verbal -- whatever it is that the end customer knows fairly quickly that it's not a very good quality experience," Reinemann said.
"With almost 18 million contact center agents around the world, there's a lot of opportunity to improve operations, even if it's only a little bit for every agent that you have out there," he added. "That's the real potential for organizations that implement this."
A/B testing tool to come
The company also previewed Synthetic Research, a method to artificially test and provide feedback on CX scenarios such as marketing campaigns, product introductions, or pricing and service changes using generative AI. The tool relies on curated data from multiple sources, including the internet, and is trained by humans at Qualtrics.
Synthetic Research is available now as a managed service; a self-service version will likely launch later this year.
Companies such as Amplitude, Adobe and Optimizely already offer something similar, typically called A/B testing, to provide anonymized customer data as digital look-alike audiences focused on one particular action such marketing campaigns, ad testing or website presentation. Qualtrics' version is a general-purpose tool for products, campaigns and more, according to Brad Anderson, president of products, UX, engineering and ecosystem at Qualtrics.
Such testing tools replace marketing panels of consumers that provide feedback on potential changes or updates a company might make to its offerings before they are released.
"Our synthetic panels automatically respond back in seconds to minutes," Anderson said. "The rate at which organizations can refine and understand the next actions they should take shrinks dramatically."
Don Fluckinger is a senior news writer for Informa TechTarget. He covers customer experience, digital experience management and end-user computing. Got a tip? Email him.
