Last week, Medallia held its Experience user conference.
One year after Mark Bishof took the helm and completely refreshed the leadership team, it was the right moment to take stock of how the company’s Act 3 is shaping up.
Founded in the early 2000s, Medallia took off in the mid-2010s as an enterprise feedback management and survey software provider. After becoming public in 2019, it expanded aggressively into multiple market adjacencies through a series of targeted acquisitions, including Strikedeck for customer success management, Zingle for customer messaging, Stella Connect for quality management, Voci Technologies for for speech analytics and conversation intelligence, Thunderhead for customer journey orchestration, and Mindful, formerly Virtual Hold, for callbacks. The 2021 acquisition by Thoma Bravo opened its latest chapter.
Mark discussed how his first 12 months focused on rebuilding a customer-centric culture and modernizing the platform, with a strong emphasis on text analytics. One of Medallia’s strategic uses of AI is to help users maximize its rich set of capabilities and remove the friction created by their sophistication, which can slow implementation and hinder full adoption. It unveiled Insights Assistant as a step up from Ask Athena in how users interact with the platform. It’s important to stress that, despite numerous acquisitions, Medallia has maintained a singular architecture, which, together with its ability to scale to meet the needs of the largest enterprises, continues to underpin this evolution. He briefly addressed financial performance for the fiscal year ended in January, pointing to business momentum and AI adoption, with more than 550 customers using its Frontline AI products.
The presence of large enterprise customers was notable. Even more significant were the stories they shared and the magnitude of their deployments. Bank of America, for example, collects data across more than 50 touchpoints through Medallia, which is used by 60,000 frontline employees in its consumer banking business.
Chief Strategy Officer Sid Banerjee urged customers to become change agents, a call to action reflecting the industry’s ongoing shift from traditional surveys to capturing a broader set of signals—including digital, contact center, physical, and franchise experiences—to drive meaningful transformations.
Experience management vendors are not immune to enterprises re-evaluating their SaaS investments in the AI era. Anecdotally, I heard that large enterprises are reaffirming their commitment to Medallia for two reasons: the platform is deeply embedded in their operations, and it can orchestrate workflows across complex organizations to share insights with customer-facing teams, celebrate successes, and assign corrective actions.
Medallia executives expressed strong conviction that combining signals not only generates insights exponentially but also establishes the foundation to link them to key outcomes—revenue, retention, operational inefficiencies, risk reduction, and regulatory compliance.
Text analytics is central to enabling this vision. Chief Product Officer Fabrice Martin explained that while AI can operate unsupervised to surface insights from massive datasets, Medallia has found that topics remain foundational: they ensure traceability by linking insights to actual experiences and enable consistent tracking over time to measure improvement. To support this, Medallia announced Smart Topic Builder, which helps identify topics, define the keywords and linguistic rules to track them, and audit their precision to validate the rules.
The scale of data Medallia collects and connects is impressive, positioning the platform to play a pivotal role for AI-driven insights, as highlighted by its strategic partnership with Ada announced last month. To fully seize this opportunity, Medallia and Experience Management providers more broadly will need to actively drive customers to place these platforms at the center of sales and customer service workflow design.