At Experience, Medallia’s annual customer event in Las Vegas recently, there was, as you might have expected, a flurry of announcements about new product developments.
The main thrust of these solutions was to make it easier for users not only to capture experience signals and insights but also to quickly make decisions and take action on those insights across a business.
The announcements included:
- Insights Assistant: Empowers teams to ‘talk’ to their data using plain language to validate hypotheses and uncover root causes in seconds, while retaining organizational context and access control.
- Smart Topic Builder: Uses AI for quick, transparent trend discovery, highlighting emerging themes within minutes, with human oversight to ensure trust and accuracy.If there was one announcement that captured the imagination of many conference goers it was this one, with one person telling me that this new feature could save them hours, if not days, each week.
- Multilingual GenAI Analytics: Medallia’s native GenAI capabilities, including Intelligent Summaries for text analytics and conversational data, Root Cause Assist, and Smart Response, have been expanded and are now available in French and German in addition to Spanish, which was added last autumn. This enables global teams to standardize insights and diminish dependence on native-language analysts.
- Enhanced Action Planning: New features now enable teams to initiate Action Plans directly from any report as soon as an issue is identified. Additionally, by linking specific actions to changes in business metrics like NPS, organizations can identify which operational adjustments are driving measurable business improvements.
- B2B Account Profiles: Offers a unified view of B2B account intelligence, integrating business-level health metrics and stakeholder interactions to streamline retention and growth strategies.
What Will the Tools Deliver
These new AI-enabled services, according to Mark Bishof, Medallia’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, in his opening keynote, are set to build on the “strong” momentum that Medallia built up over the course of 2025, and that, in turn, will help their clients transform experience into business outcomes, a key (and welcome) theme of the event.
Fabrice Martin, Chief Product Officer at Medallia, in another keynote, elaborated on the momentum messaging, noting that they now have over 550 brands using their Frontline-Ready AI products.
He went on to say that the number of feedback signals Medallia is processing across its platform grew from 3.2 billion to 4.1 billion during 2025, representing a 30% year-on-year increase, as well as a more than threefold increase in AI requests, from 930 million to 3 billion in 2025.
However, while Bishof and Martin told a compelling growth story, it was the keynote from Sid Banerjee, Chief Strategy Officer at Medallia, that really chimed with me.
Why? Well, because he talked about the very nature of transformation and how it’s incumbent on CX leaders and practitioners to be the changemakers.
As Banerjee noted:
“We are more than survey people. We have to be. We cannot be CX practitioners in the 21st century by just relying mostly on surveys. We have to be connectors, which means we connect the dots across the organization, across signals and across customer journeys.
“We have to be conductors, by orchestrating better experiences, better journeys, and change in our organization.
“We have to be consultants to the rest of the company to help them figure out how the valuable information we have makes their jobs better and their customer experiences better.
“We have to be architects by thinking about the technology that we should be bringing into CX. And then finally, when we do all those things together, we also have to be business transformation agents.
“We have to be business changers, where we create a culture of continuous communication, continuous engagement, and ultimately a continuous improvement of experiences.
“Because we see everything. When we architect these kinds of solutions, we see the entire journey in ways that a lot of the business lines do not.”
No CX Leader Is an Island
Now, many of you may have heard that sort of exhortation to action before.
This time, however, Banerjee went further and challenged the audience (and the broader CX community) to become changemakers in their own organizations.
He suggested that they should start by answering these three questions:
- What one outcome will you improve first?
- Which stakeholder will benefit? and
- Who are you going to text this week to start that conversation?
I love these three questions. They are a real call to action. But, they also remind us that, as John Donne, the 17th-century English metaphysical poet, said, “No man is an island.”
Or, in this case, ‘No CX leader is an island.’
Banerjee’s suggestion is so true. However, in the hustle and bustle of organizational life, it’s often easy to get caught up in our own roles and initiatives, and forget that organizations are human systems that thrive on cooperation and collaboration.
Indeed, this can be seen with the CX team at a life insurance company I wrote about some years ago, who struggled to establish their relevance and impact within the larger organization.
Only when they re-oriented their focus to thinking about how they could use their tools, data, insights and skills to transform the core business did they start to generate real traction and impact.
Other CX leaders and teams who find themselves in a similar position, where they are struggling to gain attention, traction, or making an impact within their organizations would benefit from considering Banerjee’s questions and heeding his call to action.
