**Zig Serafin Steps Down as Qualtrics CEO Amid Strategic Shift Toward Agentic AI**
Zig Serafin is stepping down as CEO of Qualtrics after nine years with the company—a surprise move that comes as the experience management (XM) vendor positions itself to help buyers guide and better understand their agentic AI deployments.
Serafin announced this week that he’s transitioning to Vice Chairman and Special Advisor. Meanwhile, board members Jim Whitehurst (former Red Hat CEO) and Mark Gillett (from Silver Lake) will step in as interim co-CEOs while the company searches for a permanent replacement.
In a note to employees, Serafin acknowledged that “there’s never a perfect time to step back from something you love,” but emphasized that “now is the right time to begin a thoughtful search for our next CEO.” He added:
> “Today, Qualtrics is the AI Experience Management partner to the world’s most iconic organizations, shaping the most critical experiences in business and in people’s lives. That’s a legacy and a future we should all be incredibly proud of.”
### Timing and Company Trajectory
The timing of Serafin’s departure is especially interesting, as Qualtrics has maintained a clear strategy in recent years and is heading toward $2 billion in revenue.
The vendor is also preparing to integrate Press Ganey Forsta, the $6.75 billion healthcare experience management acquisition announced earlier this year. (You can read my recent interview with Serafin on that announcement [here].)
More significantly, the company has been making substantial bets on agentic AI—positioning itself not as a competitor to operational agents from the likes of Salesforce, ServiceNow, or SAP, but as something different: the “experience layer” that measures and ensures quality across AI-driven interactions.
### Building the Foundation
When Serafin joined Qualtrics in 2016 as COO, he came from an 18-year career at Microsoft where he led products like Skype for Business. At that time, Qualtrics was already a significant player in survey and experience management software.
His tenure, which saw him become CEO in 2020, has been marked by significant transitions, including:
– An $8 billion acquisition by SAP
– An IPO in 2021
– Returning to private ownership in 2023 at a $12.5 billion valuation led by Silver Lake
Throughout these ownership changes, Serafin appeared to be building toward a specific vision.
In conversations with diginomica earlier this year, Qualtrics executives outlined a strategy that feels quite different from the agentic AI approaches pursued by most enterprise software vendors.
Rather than building standalone AI agents or rushing to acquire AI startups, the company has been embedding agentic capabilities into its core products—the ones customers already use heavily.
Brad Anderson, President of Products at Qualtrics, explained the approach during our conversation at the company’s X4 Summit in April:
> “A survey, a good old fashioned survey—the next button is clicked 50,000 times every 60 seconds for Qualtrics surveys, and it peaks at 300,000 times every 60 seconds. By agentifying that, every one of those can be an opportunity to close the loop for the customer.”
This pragmatic, build-not-buy strategy came after Qualtrics evaluated more than 100 potential acquisition targets, according to Anderson. The conclusion was that buying technology in such a rapidly evolving market wouldn’t provide meaningful advantages—particularly when no vendor has yet achieved scale with agentic deployments.
### The Experience Data Advantage
What Serafin leaves behind is a company with a unique asset: a vast repository of human sentiment data collected through billions of customer and employee interactions and an expanding platform.
This isn’t operational data about transactions or processes—it’s data about how people feel about those experiences.
When I spoke with Gurdeep Pall, Qualtrics’ AI President, earlier this year, he suggested that this experience data could eventually enable applications beyond traditional experience management.
The company’s thesis is that in a world where multiple AI agents will handle operational tasks, someone needs to ensure these agents deliver the kind of experiences that build trust and loyalty—rather than eroding them.
Given that trust in agentic AI will be critical to its success, this is a compelling argument.
Anderson articulated this positioning clearly:
> “One of the unique values that we bring, independent of what agent is being used, is the ability to be able to tell an organization: Is your digital agent giving the same experience that your best humans do? That’s the difference between an operational agent and an experience agent.”
### Healthcare as a Proving Ground
The Press Ganey Forsta acquisition takes on added significance in this context. Healthcare is arguably the most critical of all human experiences—moments when people are at their most vulnerable and where the quality of interaction can have long-lasting consequences.
When Serafin announced the deal, he told me healthcare was becoming “the proving ground for the enterprise.”
The sector’s combination of complex regulations, life-or-death stakes, and massive inefficiencies makes it an ideal testbed for whether AI can truly improve human experiences at scale.
With Press Ganey, Qualtrics gains not just a larger healthcare presence but deeper domain expertise in a sector ripe for AI-driven transformation.
If the company can demonstrate that its experience platform can improve healthcare interactions while maintaining quality and trust, the argument for deploying similar approaches across other industries becomes considerably stronger.
### My Take
What’s clear from Serafin’s tenure is that Qualtrics understands where it adds value.
Rather than attempting to be everything to everyone, it’s carved out a specific role: the layer that ensures AI systems deliver the kinds of human experiences organizations actually want.
The agentic AI market is still nascent, and many competing visions exist for how enterprise AI architectures will evolve.
Qualtrics is betting that as organizations deploy multiple operational agents, they’ll need a way to ensure these agents don’t degrade customer and employee experiences—and that experience data will be the key to making that assessment.
In his announcement, Serafin emphasized that the company is “at a key acceleration and inflection point.”
He’s built the platform and established the strategic direction. Now it falls to his successors to execute against that vision in an increasingly crowded and competitive market.
Let’s see who and what comes next!
In the meantime, I’m pleased Serafin is sticking around as an advisor and look forward to seeing what the next few months bring.
https://diginomica.com/qualtrics-ceo-zig-serafin-steps-down-after-nine-years-building-experience-platform-ready-ais
