Meet XM/os2: Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered Experience Management

Today, we’re revealing one of the most exciting technology releases in our 20-year history — XM/os2. It brings together the power of Qualtrics AI and new generative AI capabilities with the world’s largest human sentiment database, to help you deliver more personalized, relevant experiences for customers and employees.

In every organization, in every industry, there’s a ton of excitement about the potential for AI. Much of that excitement surrounds generative AI — the kind of technology that’s been making headlines with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard over the past 12 months.

This is the next era-defining leap forward in technology — with the potential to be more impactful to society than the transformations mobile phones or the internet brought.

Qualtrics is at the forefront of AI advancements, infusing XM/OS with predictive and generative capabilities, integrating conversational understanding, language generation and summarization, and developing models for action, friction detection, and emotional intensity analysis to enhance user experiences.

And its potential for Experience Management (XM) is incredible.

Meet the next generation of XM

Here at Qualtrics, we’ve been working hard over the past several years to refine our own AI on the XM Platform®, and earlier this year at X4 we launched a host of new AI-powered tools.

Now, with XM/os2, AI is a foundational technology of the XM Platform® and no longer limited to a particular set of tools or features. That means XM/os2 will soon be leveraged across every one of our product suites, and by every single user.

The potential for AI in XM has been pretty evident for a few years now. After all, the XM Platform® has what we believe to be the largest database of human sentiment anywhere on the planet — last year alone, more than 3.5 billion pieces of customer and employee feedback were collected and analyzed on the Qualtrics platform.

This collection of human experience data - from calls, emails, feedback, social conversations, online reviews, chats, chatbot interactions, and more, can enable a more accurate and powerful AI for XM.

Now the power of that data set is being unleashed with generative AI to deliver personalized content and drive automated actions that make frontline workers more productive, make HR leaders and managers more effective, and empower product, brand and research teams with decision intelligence, in seconds.

Transforming frontline service delivery with generative AI

In XM for Customer Frontlines, XM/os2 is now able to process billions of customer data points in a fraction of a second and generate personalized responses to each customer.

Previously, organizations had to rely on survey responses to find and follow up with unhappy customers, which was a time-consuming process. Now, they can identify issues and take immediate action, all while a conversation is taking place.

And thanks to the rich data you can collect using Experience iD — your single source of truth of every customer interaction — it personalizes and tailors the response to each customer’s individual needs and preferences.

XM/os2 can instantly generate summaries after every single interaction, automatically create support tickets based on a real-time understanding of every conversation, and proactively recommend actions to agents and chatbots tailored to every customer and every situation.

And the best part? It all happens before the customer has put down the phone or closed the chat window.

It can even create new support articles and FAQs using generative AI, identifying common customer issues, establishing the most common fixes, and then instantly updating knowledge base articles and other resources to help other customers self-serve.

It’s a game-changer for organizations that spend millions on service recovery every year.

First, it reduces call times by getting agents straight to the right answer; it improves customer satisfaction by getting customers back on track, faster; and it dramatically cuts operating costs by increasing first call resolution, cutting out manual processes like post-call summaries, and by using every call to improve the level of service for the next customer.

Level-up your managers with a personalized AI coach on XM for People Teams

For HR Leaders, XM/os2 will give more visibility not only into the employee experience, but it will give them a helping hand, too, by unlocking individual managers as an essential lever in driving productivity, engagement, and retention.

Now, the XM Platform® can pull in unstructured data like public posts on review websites or anonymized conversations in public Slack channels (with support for Microsoft Teams coming). Employee experience data won’t be confined to just the responses to an annual engagement or quarterly pulse survey.

These new data sources can be combined with survey and operational data like number of hours worked, working location, tenure or any other data [1] you’re already collecting, and be opened up to the AI on XM/os2 to go deeper into the employee experience than ever before.

Qualtrics AI will enable you to create summaries of employee experience data, and find links between HR metrics and behavioral patterns, like how full people’s calendars are, whether they’re working after hours, or even which topics they’re getting fired up about on Slack.

And like all our XM for People Teams tools, you have the option to  pseudonymize or anonymize data, so you get the insights you need to improve the experience, while your people’s privacy remains a top priority.

But it’s not just HR leaders who play a role in the employee experience — in fact, many studies show individual managers are just as, if not more, important when it comes to influencing employees.

With Qualtrics AI built into Manager Assist — our purpose-built experience for individual managers — you can now make sure every manager has personalized insights and actionable recommendations they need to improve things for their teams.

Tools like personalized AI-driven coaching plans, team-level insights, and tailored recommendations for individual managers highlight the most impactful things they need to focus on to improve the metrics that matter most.

As a manager, let me tell you, this is exactly what I need — a prioritized ‘to-do’ list that focuses my time and effort on things that will actually move the needle for the team without having to become a PhD-level statistician to get there.

Make your research work harder for the organization

Organizations spend billions on research every year, whether it’s identifying gaps in the market to grow their business, testing new products and services, or updating their brand positioning as their market moves.

In the past, the vast majority of that research was conducted using  surveys or time-consuming activities like focus groups or diary studies.

Now, with the power of generative AI, we’re giving our customers new ways to get rich insights through video feedback.

Gone are the days of time-consuming, manual analysis — participants can now just provide their feedback via a video and it’s transcribed and analyzed automatically.

Our AI goes above and beyond simply summarizing videos. It enables you to identify key feedback themes and insights – including suggested key questions to ask to dig in further, all using your own words. Consider it your very own marketing assistant, always ready to help you make sense of the wealth of information at your fingertips.

Another big challenge we hear from our customers is that research is all too often ‘one and done’ — a project is run, product launched, and then the data is never seen again.

It’s a challenge we’re solving with AI of XM/os2 with the upcoming launch of Research Hub — a searchable database of every single research study and insight your organization has ever collected.

With the processing power of Qualtrics AI, you can now bring all that research together, analyze it as a single dataset, and put long-forgotten insights to work by making them available to everyone in the organization and identifying fresh insights by bringing previously siloed datasets together.

Thanks to Qualtrics AI, anyone in the company can simply ask a question, and our AI will instantly serve up the answer based on the millions of data points collected by the organization over time.

It'll make everyone in the organization smarter, and give them access to the kinds of tools that have previously only been available to seasoned researchers at the world’s biggest companies.

AI built into the foundations of XM

For all the new features and tools AI is unlocking on XM/os2, perhaps the most exciting is what it does to the core functionalities of the platform that many of you are using today.

The platform is essentially powered by 3 core technologies — Experience iD, iQ, and xFlow.

Each one of these technologies now has AI baked-in.

It means Experience iD can now update customer or employee segments in real-time based on what people are saying or doing in the real world.

xFlow can now automatically trigger GPT-powered actions in the systems the company has already connected to OpenAI.

iQ can now make predictions faster, and more accurately than ever, and provide instant summaries of even the most complex datasets thanks to generative AI that processes billions of data points in a fraction of a second and serves up an answer in everyday, conversational language that everybody in the organization can act on.

And it’s all done with security and privacy front of mind. With XM/os2, you still control your customer and employee data, and you still have all the privacy and security controls in place that make the XM Platform® trusted by more than 18,750 organizations from government agencies to the biggest financial services providers, healthcare companies, and technology giants in the world today.

We are so excited by the new features XM/os2 unlocks, and when it comes to AI and XM we're just getting started so watch this space for more as we continue to develop more innovative tools to help make your business more human with XM.