News Analysis
SALT LAKE CITY — A little bit of snow on the ground in Salt Lake City did nothing to stand in the way of Qualtrics X4 Experience Management Summit, an annual event this week showcasing the latest in customer experience, employee experience and agentic AI innovations. Qualtrics is a customer and employee experience management provider that delivered over 1.2 billion surveys, plus over 2 billion chats and calls in 2024.
While Qualtrics made several announcements at the Salt Palace Convention Center, some of the most interesting takeaways involved synthetic research and personas that can assist in customer experience research, as well as how agentic AI can deliver on the promise of seamless omnichannel experiences at scale.
Let’s look at some of the ways that synthetic personas and research can enable quicker—and better—insights:
Table of Contents
- Speed to Insight and Continuous Improvement of CX at Scale
- Understanding Business Context and Opportunity … Instantly
- From Agents to Insights: How Synthetic and Agentic AI Are Shaping Experience Delivery
Speed to Insight and Continuous Improvement of CX at Scale
It’s an understatement to say that things move fast for brands trying to understand their current and potential customers. Enter synthetic personas, that have the potential to cut research time from weeks to minutes and costs up to 70%, so marketing and teams can focus more of their energy on creating great strategies and moving faster.
Qualtrics Edge Audiences is the product built around this idea, and draws on a variety of sources. Rather than relying on an off-the-shelf generative AI tool to mimic a persona, these synthetic personas combine the company’s wealth of experience data, plus other sources of publicly available data to offer predictive insights quickly, and at scale.
Not only does the promise of synthetic personas allow companies that don’t have the resources to perform large research projects, it also dramatically cuts the time to insights, meaning that companies can do more testing, iterate and improve faster.
We are only scratching the surface here, too. Think about the power of synthetic research for the following use cases:
| Use Case | Description | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Rapid Hypothesis Testing | Test product or campaign ideas quickly across a variety of demographic, behavioral or psychographic profiles using synthetic research. | Speeds up decision-making and reduces costs while increasing the accuracy of targeting strategies. |
| Sourcing Hard-to-Reach Audiences | Use synthetic data to model audiences that are typically difficult or expensive to reach for traditional testing. | Expands research capabilities and allows for inclusive product development and marketing strategies. |
| Keeping Pace with Change | Continuously monitor and model evolving customer behavior, market shifts and audience responsiveness. | Enables agile decision-making in fast-changing markets and ensures ongoing relevance of campaigns and products. |
This is a fast-moving space, but even in these early days synthetic data for research has potential to save time, money, and help brands keep pace with these changing times.
Related Article: Qualtrics Introduces New Market Intelligence Capabilities for the Next Generation of Market Insights
Understanding Business Context and Opportunity … Instantly
Just as it is important to understand audiences more quickly than ever, businesses need to understand the competitive and economic environment they are operating within, and using last year’s data isn’t good enough anymore—if it ever was.
Qualtrics also announced its Edge Instant Insights that gives brands visibility into market trends, competitive benchmarks and other industry-specific analysis—potentially millions of datapoints—tied together with the latest AI tools and methods, turning what previously took weeks of research and analysis into a near-instant set of answers.
By using the power of generative AI and other methods to tie all of these sources together, the following becomes possible:
| Capability | Description | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Rapid Benchmark Comparisons | Compare company performance against competitors in real time using generative AI and unified data sources. | Enables faster strategic pivots and better competitive positioning within industry-specific contexts. |
| Continuous Analysis | Reduces research turnaround from weeks to minutes, enabling real-time monitoring and analysis. | Keeps teams agile and informed without overloading internal resources or delaying decisions. |
| Strategic Prioritization | Identifies emerging opportunities like under-served segments or white-space markets as they develop. | Drives proactive strategy, helping businesses act on insights before competitors do. |
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All of this adds up to a more continuous method of strategic innovation and insights that makes benchmarking, analysis and opportunity-spotting a part of business as usual rather than something that gets done when time allows.
From Agents to Insights: How Synthetic and Agentic AI Are Shaping Experience Delivery
Of course, there were several other announcements at Qualtrics X4 as well, including agentic AI solutions for creating more seamless customer experiences, as well as more unified tools to enhance the employee experience and employees’ ability to serve customers.
All of this, together with synthetic capabilities, means that quicker insights and experimentation can be applied more broadly across the business, with greater democratization of insights to employees, and to deliver experiences at the one-to-one scale that customers expect. This is the year that synthetic is getting real.
