Qualtrics Innovation & Technology Culture

What’s one key communication habit you’ve developed and encouraged among your team? 

To me, the most critical habit any product and engineering team should have is customer obsession. If your team is deeply connected with customers, you’re going to build the right products that will hit market-fit faster. If you want to drive the habit of customer connection, it has to be a key part of your reward and celebration system. So how do you do that for a software company? You focus the reward and celebration system around customer usage.

What effect has customer obsession had on the way your team works and collaborates?

By focusing the reward and celebration system on usage, you put the customer at the center of everything the team does. When I say reward and recognition system, I mean that the team’s bonus and equity rewards are based on driving and exceeding high-quality usage targets. 

Instead of teams focusing on shipping new technology, which is often how software teams are rewarded, you focus the entire team on the customer. If a customer is blocked or struggling, the reward and celebration system says you should drop everything you’re doing and assist the customer.
 

What advice do you have for other engineering managers who are looking to create healthy communication habits among their teams?

Data empowers people and teams. The more data people have, the more they can make independent decisions that align with the overall mission and strategy of the team. My principle here has been to share as much data as possible. 

One approach I have taken for more than a decade is to hold a monthly meeting with all of the people managers in the organization, which I call “Brad’s Top of Mind.” The meeting gives me a chance to share with the managers what’s top of mind for me. This empowers our managers as they lead their people because they know where their leader’s mind is focused. It’s also a key driver of culture, which is the most important thing for leaders to focus on.

What fresh opportunities does AI open up across the industry?

In the immediate future, AI is opening up opportunities for simple code generation and brainstorming in new ways. It allows us to focus on complex problems and apply our knowledge, with a supporting lens to push on those problems. Similar to the evolution that occurred from the ’80s to ’90s with compiler systems where the operating system developer was the “best” job, and the ’90s to ’00s where the focus moved to web development and cloud development, the introduction of AI is moving us toward a new area of domain expertise. 

There’s so much potential for simplifying heavy lift and repetitive tasks, that the result of this focus is going to be professionals with better skills for more challenging problems, while AI simplifies the more mundane tasks. It’s also letting us work with multiple models in a scaled manner — something that absorbed a lot of time in the past. 

Imran on our team called out: “Newer generations will be more proficient with AI tools and they could start at higher abstraction and will be more efficient with complex problems. Problems they are solving will be very different from now and current skills will be replaced with new skills.”

What new skills have you learned as generative AI becomes common in the industry? How has your own daily work changed as you’ve integrated these tools?

The new skills have really focused on the technical refinement of our current skill sets. It’s helped push us to write code in different ways — making our code more Pythonic, for instance — as well as helping us align to best practices as we learn new programming languages. 

AI is showing up for us daily — from using it to problem solve with pro/con listing, to writing unit testing, optimizing code, addressing naming conventions and more. It’s been about expediting the development process, which has allowed us to put energy toward more critical work.

What is the unique story that you feel your company has with AI? If you were writing about it, what would the title of your blog be?
We’ve been pioneering AI/ML within our category of experience management software for quite some time; the more recent GenAI wave has accelerated our efforts here. Our focus is on creating and developing capabilities that build customer and employee connections. These connections are what give companies a competitive edge, and it makes Qualtrics’s story pretty unique in a loud AI market.

A potential title could be “How AI powers world-class experience management” or even “Using AI to improve the human experience.”

Our company mission is to improve the human experience. That requires experience management — a purposeful design and development of experiences. AI, enabled with the right information, accelerates the ability to do that. Our AI solution helps our customers discover blind spots, identify the next trends, foster loyalty and enables them to take action in the moment while prioritizing security and privacy. Putting them — and us — on the road to making those improvements in the human experience.

What are you most excited about in the field of AI right now?
I’ve been most excited by the pace at which the state and capabilities of the technology are evolving rapidly. And with that we at Qualtrics are constantly thinking about how to evolve our software offering to best take advantage of these innovations and deliver even more value to our customers.

For example, at X4 we announced our entrance into experience agents: digital workers to help manage and resolve experience management issues. They’re the next era of XM and are extending the value of Qualtrics and XM, so it’s easy to be excited about their role in the market.
It’s been exciting to be building on top of the latest frontier models like OpenAI ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Meta’s LlaMA and more, leveraging large language models while evolving the state of experience management.

We’ve also been rapidly adopting and building with AI dev tools, seeing unprecedented productivity uplift with the use of code generation tools. Internally, we’ve been rapidly evolving our own internal dev tooling, having built over 20 internal apps to assist with trend analysis, issue analysis, development, testing and modeling.

AI is a constantly evolving field. Very few people coming into these roles have years of experience to pull from. Explain what continuous learning looks like on your team. How do you learn from one another and collaborate?
We’ve been actively working to upskill our current and incoming talent through a variety of learning and development activities.

Broadly, the Qualtrics team is hands-on in our own AI playground. We want the team to be confident with what AI can do and be pushing the boundaries of their own work through the use of AI.

In 2024 we brought onboard Gurdeep Singh Pall as our first-ever president, AI strategy. He brought with him over 30 years of experience creating new products and solutions with AI technologies. He spearheaded, among other things, Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, and in his time here has led AI strategy, including our recent entrance into experience agents.
Here in R&D we’re constantly actively hiring for the best talent in AI/ML.

Internally, we’ve also been running maximum likelihood estimation programs which aim to integrate ML engineers into our existing scrum teams, upskilling secure data exchanges.

We’re also constantly experimenting and learning. We run annual AI summits, bringing together hackathon-style demos and discussions, and we also run regular hackathons in engineering.