The companies that win are the ones that understand the people and markets they serve—what they want, what they'll pay for, which ideas will resonate—and act when it matters.
Market research shapes what gets built and how it's positioned. Customer and employee experience programs track whether it's working. Together, they create a feedback loop that compounds understanding over time. The teams getting this right are earning bigger budgets, driving greater influence, and delivering business results.
The highest-stakes questions require methodologies designed to reveal true customer preferences. Purpose-built AI—powered by context from two decades of human preference data—puts that expertise within reach, delivering insights while the window to act is still open. And as AI becomes more prevalent, data integrity is what earns and keeps stakeholder trust in research.
Today at X4®, Qualtrics announced new capabilities across the Market Research suite that close the gap between question and action: capturing trusted market insights faster, testing concepts with synthetic data, and surfacing insights across existing research.
Listen to the market faster
Synthetic panels for US consumers allow organizations to simulate how consumers would respond to research questions, giving teams a way to test concepts, messaging, and product decisions in hours instead of weeks and at half the cost of human panels. Qualtrics' synthetic panels for US consumers are powered by a fine-tuned large language model built specifically for market research, delivering 12x better accuracy in matching human responses than general-purpose AI.
Qualtrics® lets organizations combine synthetic and human panels on a single platform, including first-party customer panels, over 200 million third-party global respondents, and specialized participants for in-depth qualitative research. This breadth of insights gives teams the confidence and ability to accelerate decisions without recruitment delays or budget uncertainty, test concepts fast, and validate high-stakes decisions with synthetic and human panels.
Qualtrics continues to invest in expanding these capabilities, with synthetic panels for UK and Ireland, Canada, and Australia and New Zealand populations launching in the first half of 2026. New self-serve use cases will enable teams to extend human panel research with follow-up synthetic responses, and conversation-based experiences will allow brands to live-chat with audience segments to stress-test ideas in real-time.
Research teams across industries - including Navy Federal Credit Union, Zip, Loop Earplugs, and Dollar Shave Club - are using Qualtrics to cut research timelines from weeks to hours, validate decisions with synthetic and human panels, and surface insights across existing research to drive business outcomes.
Gabb, a leader in safe tech for kids, used synthetic panels alongside a traditional human panel to ground product and marketing decisions in a deep understanding of parents' concerns. The results: insights 98% faster, at half the cost, with findings that matched human panel data and gave the team confidence to move forward on product and messaging decisions.
“Synthetic data became our ‘cultural radar,’cutting research timelines from a week to hours while giving us confidence to test messaging against emerging trends. The blended approach lets us move faster on early-stage testing, then validate high-stakes decisions with human panels,” said Garred Sheppard, Marketing Research Director, Gabb.
Faster decisions start with accessible research insights and design
One bottlenecks have always constrained market research: finding what you've already learned. In most organizations, past research sits fragmented across departments, putting years of accumulated research out of reach.
Qualtrics is removing this barrier.
New capabilities in Research hub transform existing research into a conversational answer engine. Teams can ask questions across their entire body of work and get direct, evidence-backed answers and recommendations in seconds—without hunting through files or waiting on analysts. AI Summary & Recommendations surfaces and connects findings across the organization, eliminates duplication, and turns years of accumulated research into institutional knowledge anyone can access.
A global consumer retail brand is using Qualtrics to instantly surface years of ad hoc survey work in response to stakeholder questions like "What do we know about consumer comfort over time?" Instead of manually digging through past projects, teams can search a topic and receive a clear summary that highlights relevant studies and key themes. When existing data is insufficient, the platform recommends the appropriate research methodology—such as Conjoint or MaxDiff—helping teams move from curiosity to validated research design faster, and decisions they can trust.
Quotes on the news
"With our synthetic model, we started with the hardest problem: building synthetic panels that deliver research-grade accuracy. And this is backed by advanced research capabilities that give the whole organization both speed and rigor: insights in hours instead of weeks, and years of research surfaced in seconds," said Brad Anderson, President of Products, Engineering, User Experience, and Security at Qualtrics.