Qualtrics announced a new platform that aims to close what it calls the Experience Gap - the distance between what people expect and what organizations deliver. The company pegs the cost of poor customer experiences at close to US $3 trillion in at-risk sales. The XM Data & AI Platform, scheduled for release in 2027, combines simulation, prediction, and automated action inside a single system built on what Qualtrics describes as the world's largest AI dataset for human experiential context.
"Experience has always been the strategy every leader believed in, but unfortunately the technology wasn't available to execute at scale," said Jason Maynard, CEO of Qualtrics. "Customer lifetime value determines how a company performs over time, and experience is what builds and compounds that value. XM Data & AI is how organisations deliver legendary outcomes in the moments that matter."
The platform arrives after Qualtrics' US $6.75 billion acquisition of Press Ganey Forsta in May 2026, which brought decades of healthcare experience data and established regulatory governance into the Qualtrics dataset. That anonymized health and wellness data extends the human context behind the platform, applying the same rigor that governs patient care to experience management across industries.
Experience Loops replace static journey maps
The platform organizes work around Experience Loops - continuous cycles that run from acquiring customers to retaining and growing them - rather than linear journey maps that have a fixed endpoint. Within those loops sit Experience Moments, the individual interactions where lifetime value compounds or erodes. Simulation, prediction, and trusted outcomes separate this system from general-purpose models that lack experience context and from static data hubs that only report after the fact.
Underpinning the loops is an experience ontology that gives data meaning: what a signal is, who it belongs to, where it sits in the lifecycle, and what the next best outcome should be. Without that layer, Qualtrics argues, AI produces answers that are plausible but often wrong. With it, Experience Agents produce outcomes the organization would have approved itself. Customer data never leaves the organization's environment and never trains shared models.
Simulation and prediction before action
Experience simulation generates synthetic data and builds digital twins of real customers, letting organizations test pricing changes, new offerings, or policy shifts before they reach the market. These are research-grade simulations fine-tuned on Qualtrics' own research corpus, not general-purpose models role-playing a persona. Prediction moves from population-level behavior to individual likelihood: small language models trained on Qualtrics' proprietary datasets forecast how specific experience decisions will shape engagement, satisfaction, and lifetime value.
Trusted Outcomes then close the loop. Before any action reaches a real person, the platform checks it against the organization's rules and policies. Experience Agents act inside the moment within those boundaries, and what the system learns in one moment makes the next more precise.
Early customer results and two new capabilities
TruGreen deployed Experience Agents across millions of customer interactions and reported $7 million in ROI from closed-loop feedback with automated responses, a 30 percent reduction in customer escalations, and $30 million in total ROI across digital optimization, retention, and churn prevention. SiriusXM is also working with Qualtrics to shift its approach. "It's not enough to know what's resonating after the fact," said Steve Lilly, Director of Customer Experience at SiriusXM. "The organisations that win are the ones that can hear signals across every touchpoint and act on it in real time."
Two capabilities are available immediately. The X-Loop Diagnostic Service maps the customer lifecycle, identifies missing data, and surfaces disconnected systems that block visibility into what comes next. Working with Qualtrics XM Advisors, clients receive a defined relationship map, a visual model showing which moments carry weight and their business value, and a governance plan with activation priorities. Reputation Experience brings public customer feedback into the XM suite, keeping business information accurate across websites and local pages, turning survey responses into verified ratings that search engines and AI assistants can read, and managing responses across Google, Yelp, and Facebook in the brand's own voice.
Why this matters for management
The platform shifts experience management from a measurement function to an operational system that tests decisions before they cost money and acts on individual signals in real time. For managers overseeing AI for Management initiatives, the distinction matters: simulation and prediction tied to a proprietary ontology produce outcomes that can be traced to rules the organization set, not a black-box model. The TruGreen numbers - $30 million in total ROI - give a concrete benchmark for what closing the Experience Gap can return. For teams running AI for Customer Support, the move from static feedback collection to automated, policy-checked action inside the moment changes the speed at which service recovery and retention work can happen.
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