Tobacco Dock in Wapping, east London, is a place that breathes history. Former warehouses for the London Docks, the site still carries glimpses of the Victorian grandeur that accompanied its creation in the heart of the industrial revolution. This time capsule of London’s naval history was recently the site for an altogether different event focused on emerging and rapidly developing technologies, as experience management giant Qualtrics hosted the London leg of its X4 conference series, discussing its embrace of AI.

Research Live sat down for a chat with Brad Anderson, president of products, user experience (UX), engineering and ecosystem at Qualtrics, at the conference last month to discuss his views on the AI revolution. “I think it will have a profound impact,” he says. “The question comes down to ‘at what speed’. I think it will move faster than any other platform transformation we’ve ever seen.”

Anderson previously spent more than 17 years at Microsoft before moving to his current role in 2021, and was at Microsoft when the tech giant started to introduce its cloud platform in the 2010s. He argues that like cloud technology, agentic AI – AI that can understand its environment and execute complex tasks independently – would face a slower take-up initially, but will quickly become ubiquitous, a process that is arguably already underway with generative AI, or AI that can generate new material based on data it has been trained on.

“Organisations are collecting more data, most of that unstructured and unsolicited. The only way to make sense of that volume of data is to use AI,” Anderson says. Qualtrics launched its ‘Experience Agents’ agentic AI tool earlier this year, after committing to invest $500m in AI in 2023.

Anderson says brands must embrace generative and agentic AI now, to avoid being left behind as AI becomes a normal part of life. “When you have a platform shift, like what AI is, it has a profound impact on the roles and responsibilities of most functions,” he says.

“It’s like any shift – if an organisation is not keeping up and providing the tools people need, people just bring their tools in from home. And when you bring your tools in from home, you don’t have the same guardrails and the same security and privacy controls in place.”

The outside world, Anderson argues, is quickly learning AI prompting skills from their use of generative AI platforms, with ChatGPT having 400 million weekly active users. “The world is becoming more skilled at using generative AI capabilities, and organisations generally are behind where their employees are in using it in their private lives,” he explains. “This is not a time to be too cautious. Be quick, but don’t rush. You have to move quickly, but do it with the right amount deliberation. Too many organisations are being too conservative right now, and they’re going to fall behind.”

How should businesses change their culture to be able to keep up? “Many individuals need to see how something will benefit them before they will go and experiment with it,” Anderson says, adding that he believes that businesses should measure their success in introducing AI in how widespread its use is across the organisation. “I believe that every function in an organisation should have a metric of ‘are my people using AI every day’. That’s the bar. That is inclusive of every function.

“In product and engineering, we run hackathons all the time – every organisation should be doing hackathons on how to put AI to use in their function.”

Getting better data

Market research will not be immune from the AI revolution, Anderson argues, and posits that synthetic data – artificially created data that mimics real-world data – will play a key role in how insight works in the future.

“Research is going to fundamentally change,” he states. “I don’t think human panels go away, but I think you will see organisations using a hybrid [of human and synthetic panels]. They will use synthetic panels to very quickly vet ideas and take a broad list of ideas and hone that down to what they think it’s the most impactful, and then they will want to do human research on those things.

“What that allows an organisation to do is react much faster. Research organisations are being asked to do more research than they’ve ever done before, and so they’re looking for ways they can deliver on the needs of the business. Synthetic data is a perfect example of what can be done.

“It’s all about speed to market, speed to learning and speed to understanding.”

UX research will also see profound changes, Anderson argues, in two specific ways. Firstly, in the product development cycle, AI can produce the ‘mock-ups’ of products and systems much quicker than previously, potentially shortening the whole development process significantly. Anderson adds that constant feedback could help inform development of further prototypes in real time.

The second consequence, he adds, will be UX and product manager teams coming much closer together and becoming “much more unified” because of the role AI will play in generating prototypes needed in UX research.

The changes brought by AI come during a time of significant social, political and economic turbulence, wrought by the aftermath of Covid-19, political crises across the globe and a still-present cost-of-living crisis. Anderson says that this environment has created a situation where customers have greater expectations of brands. He cites Qualtrics research that indicates that two-thirds of consumers are willing to move to a competitor on the basis of a single broken promise. “All of us in our minds have a set of promises that we believe brands have made to us on the quality or experience of a product,” Anderson says. “I think expectations have been dramatically increased by consumers who want to be seen, who want to be heard, who want to be understood. Transactional systems don’t do that, but experience systems do that.”

Are brands doing a good job and adapting well to that environment? That varies by brand. “There are brands who are doing it, and are doing it very well. Those brands are the leaders. The organisations that really are focusing on building that connection with their customers are the ones which have the highest growth and the highest profit.”

The UK is leading the way in experience management, Anderson says, explaining that organisations in the country are “prioritising it and acting on it in a way that is more mature than their counterparts in the US”. A lot of it is down to culture. “The UK, the Netherlands and Australia are adopting new things faster than the rest of the world,” suggests Anderson. “I spend time every year in the UK, Netherlands and Australia as I would see things 12 to 18 months before I saw them in the rest of the world. I think there is something that is cultural about continuously optimising, continuously improving and being willing to experiment that I see in those three countries.”

What is the greatest opportunity for brands today? “The biggest opportunity, which is another way to say the biggest challenge that companies have today, is increasing the maturity of their usage and understanding of the customer experience,” Anderson advocates. “Most organisations do some measurement of the customer experience. Not enough organisations put the continuous improvement of the experience at the centre of their culture, which means putting it at the centre of their recognition and rewards system.

“The biggest piece of coaching I give to organisational leaders when I meet with them is: ‘How are you signalling to the entire company that continuous improvement of the customer experience is a top priority?’ If it’s not part of your recognition and reward system, then you’re not driving change.”