Medallia has been handed back to its lenders. Roughly $3 billion in debt, $300 million a year in interest, and the equity is effectively gone. For enterprise CX leaders running programs on that platform, the practical questions around data custody, contract continuity, and service quality are worth asking before they become urgent.
Qualtrics is carrying a significant debt load of its own and has made a different kind of decision under that pressure. They have been publicly using client survey data to train AI models and generate synthetic respondents sold back to the market. This is not a rumor. They have announced it. For any organization running sensitive customer feedback through that platform, the question of what your MSA actually protects is one your legal team should answer now.
These are not abstract financial problems. When vendors are fighting for survival, they optimize for their own interests. That is not a criticism. It is just what happens.
Both companies are betting on AI to grow their way out of their financial situations. The result is more features, more data, more dashboards. But more is not what CX programs are missing.
The Real Opportunity
The opportunity in this moment is not to find a safer platform. It is to ask a more important question: what should insights actually do to an organization?
Not sit in a dashboard. Not get presented in a quarterly review and filed away. Actually land. Change how a leadership team understands their customers. Change how they feel. Change what they believe. Change what they decide.
That has always been what a great CX program is supposed to deliver. The technology to do it at scale, in ways that are visceral and human and impossible to ignore, now exists. A customer avatar your leadership team can have a real conversation with. A reel of your detractors in their own words that makes a product manager feel something a spreadsheet never could. A short film built from your customer data that changes how people in a room think before they leave it.
This is what bringing insights to life means. And it is a fundamentally different ambition than generating more output from a platform.
The CX leaders who recognize this moment for what it is will build programs that their organizations actually feel. The ones who spend the next year debating platforms will end up in the same place they started.
The Question Worth Asking
If your current CX program is producing dashboards but not decisions, data but not change, the question is not which platform to move to. It is what your program could accomplish in the hands of people who know your industry, use AI to bring insights to life, and measure success by what changes in your organization, not what gets reported to it.
That is the opportunity we see. And we think the market has never been more ready for it.
Sean McDade is the founder and CEO of PeopleMetrics and the author of Listen or Die, Pharma Customer Experience, and The Psychology of Physician CX.