Building What’s Next in the Age of AI, Together with Our Customers

Speaker 1

And now, please give a big welcome to our emcee for the day, Liz Miller.

Are we on? Uh-oh. We might not be on. Are we oh, there we are. Now you can all hear me because there's something you should know about me. I really do love everyone paying attention to me all at once.

No distractions. Are we ready? Okay. Buttcrafted, welcome. Thanks to everyone from user testing for allowing me to be here today. I'm super excited because I love being around all of you.

How many of you know the difference between curious and inquisitive?

Raise your hand. Who who's out there? Y'all know? Okay. I see one hand which automatically You're inquisitive, aren't you?

Yeah. You are. I see you. You're holding your coffee. I can totally see you. Okay.

Here's the deal. Curious is you wonder about stuff. You might ask some questions. You might think to yourself, I wonder how that thing works.

Here's the funny thing about curiosity. It doesn't actually demand active questioning.

That's why you guys aren't curious.

I am standing in front of a room full of inquisitive because inquisitiveness demands that you can't stop yourselves from asking questions.

And more than that, you can't stop yourselves from listening. And that's the difference. That's makes you guys the ones who are building, doing. You're active. You're achieving.

And I'm so excited that we're gonna have a full afternoon of how to make all of that that you do that much better. So who wants to get this party started? Thank you so much. That was exactly the right response. As you can tell, I am a shy wallflower. You're going to have to bring me out of my shell.

So I'm also gonna need a lot of applause and cheering. But I also wanna bring to this stage someone who I would really love to rename the chief inquisitiveness officer, but CIO already exists and he's been a CFO, so he doesn't want that title again.

Finance guy. Used to think he's got all the answers. Right? Because he's got all the numbers. So the answers have to come easy. Now as a CEO, especially as a new CEO, he had to go and listen.

He had to go be inquisitive, and he needed to get answers from all of you. So let's get out onto this stage, none other than, excuse me, Eric Johnson, CEO of User Testing.

Speaker 2

I appreciate the warm welcome from everyone, and thank you all of you for joining us and being part of our community. I know I've met several people who came from literally the East Coast, so we've got people from all over the US. We've also got a great group of local people here. And I actually, personally if you don't know, I live over in Bellevue. We have our global headquarters is in Bellevue. So we too are local right here where you all, or many of you are from.

One of the places I wanted to start is just a story that I think really highlights the environment that we're in. So my wife and I have two kids. We have a fifteen year old daughter who's a freshman, just finishing up her freshman year in high school. We have a son who's nineteen, just finished his freshman year at Whitman College, which is a liberal arts school over in Walla Walla, and he plays basketball there.

And about three, four weeks ago, he calls my wife and I. He says, hey, I'm starting a business. And I said, what are you what are you doing? And he said, well me me and Stanley from my dorm, we're going to build an agent.

And we're going to build an agent that will help you jump higher. And my son had went through this whole journey. When he was like a seventh grader, the kid could barely touch the net. He was so unathletic.

And over a few years, with lots of investment in training, he got to the point where he can **** the ball behind his head, and he can dunk, he's six one, and he's really, really, really athletic. And he's like, I want to help other kids not have to have the hard journey that I had. And so literally, the guy started in Claude Code. They came to my house on a Monday, and in three days last night, I saw their agent.

And they've literally got this agent, and you type in your situation, and it starts advising you on exactly what to do. The next piece they're building is the video component. And I would venture to bet, I mean neither one of these kids, neither one of these kids has professional coding background, has ever been a coder, has ever done anything like this.

Six months ago, and for sure a year ago, there's no way they could have done it. No way could they build that agent then. And and that's the type of change that we have that's going on in our world.

And where I wanted to start is when AI can build anything, knowing what to build is everything. Knowing what to build, knowing what your customer really needs, understanding that, understanding what they think, what they feel, why, who they are, Those things have never mattered more. And right this moment in time, we can build things so incredibly fast. Over ninety percent, nearly all of software developers now use one or more egenic coding tools. Literally one year ago that was fourteen percent. There are organizations that I've personally been out to where they literally do not write any code. All of it is built agentically.

There are tons of organizations where they're not using traditional like Figma. They're doing their prototypes in Loveable, Replit, Figma Make, Cloud Design. So the world we're all working isn't changing dramatically.

The volume at which we can do what we do is massively higher. But we don't want to just produce more stuff. We want to produce the stuff that people actually want. And I think one of the things I love about this community, and I've I've been in this business now just getting close to two years, is you all, you really care about your customer.

And you want to build things and help your organizations build things that create delight and create impact and outcomes. And that's the need we have together right now. Now one of the things that I've done over the last, well, ten months or so since we were last together, is I've been on a massive listening tour. And not just myself, but others of our leaders.

I personally have seen over three hundred customers. And when you see over three hundred customers, a lot of patterns emerge. And so I wanted to just cover a few of those things, and then what we've done to take action to make life better for all of you. Number one, I heard consistently, hey, my organization is dramatically changing how we do what we can do.

And we need to work a lot faster. And you need to work where my people work. You know, if you're a professional researcher, you're probably the person being tasked with helping get insights to other people. Helping them go faster than they've ever been able to do.

Helping them self serve to some extent.

So working in the context where these people work is critical. The first step for us on that is Figma. And there is many more things that will follow.

And that's why things like the MCP server investment are so important. So that was one thing I consistently heard. Second thing related to that is how can you just make it easier for me to do my job as an advanced practitioner? And that comes down to how we leverage AI, and what we do there, and whether that's the summarization.

Or think of things like the AI prompt based testing. I don't know how many of you have had a chance to leverage our technology even in the last month or two. But now you can just go into the prompt, and you can start to interact with our service just directly back and forth. You get screener questions.

You get test plans.

You don't have to go do all those things right out of the box. That's helping people go a lot faster. A third thing I've heard consistently is this is a tough journey. And us as user testing, we're seeing what other people are doing.

We're learning the best practices. We get tons of great ideas. Can you help us? Can you come on-site?

And so one of the things we've done and we've been investing in, and we'll continue to invest in expanding, is our ability to come on-site. And so we have a fairly robust professional services organization. We're expanding that. We have over fifty people who can come on-site in person and deliver expertise around insights and how you can accelerate what you're doing in your group.

But not only that. We didn't stop there. We've built out a partner program. So we've hired a VP, Eli, about six months ago.

And we're starting to partner with a whole bunch of different partner types so that it's not only our world, it's the world of our partners. And it's the extension. There's a force multiplier with partners.

Fourth, you wanted it to be easier to buy. You know, I heard lots of stuff, especially early in the year, it's kind of hard. It's a little complicated. We want more flexibility.

And so we've been doing things to address that. So things like our team based unlimited licensing to make it easier to have more insights, to have more cost predictability. And as we move to the agentic world, and we've started to think through our pricing there, we're going to keep a little bit of that approach, at least in the initial phase. We don't think, at least what we're hearing from customers, is you want just complete volume based token outcome pricing.

And so we're going to have a model that's more predictable and more customer friendly. That's really important to us. And finally, the thing we heard consistently is there's nothing more important than who the participants are. When you go to get this feedback from real humans, well the real humans are the most important part.

And and we have this saying here, insights are only as good as the people who provide them. And we have the best. And we got there in a couple phases. One, we started to address some things that were going on with our own and how could we make it better, and changing some of our algorithms and our recruiting and our investment levels.

And we doubled down on it. And then we had been working to find the best company to acquire to strengthen what we had from a Participant Network. And by far, when we looked at every company that was available, we used some third party help, we ran our own tests, one company was amazing. And that was user interviews.

And so we've cultivated that relationship, and ultimately Basil and his team decided to join us. And so we brought user interviews into the fold. Now, we are integrating it super fast. And in fact, this week, either today or tomorrow, the button on the canvas will show up, end user testing for premium audiences.

So you'll be able to click and go right in there. In probably about three or four months, we will have the full integration of the panels done. And what that means is that that world class fraud detection, matching algorithms that we've picked up with user interviews, everyone will get the benefit of that. And we will have more seamless access to the premium participants.

Now we need to go faster. And in this world, not only are you trying to go faster, we're trying to go faster. And in order to serve this broader universe of builders and creators, we needed to do more, and we needed to do it a lot quicker. And so we looked at our own R and D organization, especially over the last few months, and we have dramatically changed what we do. This vision we have of building insights agents that then your builders and your creators can use, it's getting real. And I think what you're going to see here on stage, Mehran's going to talk a little bit about the opportunity as an industry, and what we all can do together on our choice to be more human centric.

And then the team's going to come up and show some really amazing demos of where we're heading. And this future we're heading on together is one where we will serve the full pendulum of your needs. So if you are, for example, an advanced researcher, and you want to use a deeply quantitative method, and you want to go in the UI and do that, we're going to support that. And we're going to be there for you.

Now let's imagine maybe you're someplace in the middle of that pendulum. You might be an expert. You want to work a bit more agentically, a little bit more modern, and you want to go on the prompt based experience. We offer that.

And now let's say that you're somebody who's just trying to create some content in marketing. Or maybe you're that builder over in the R and D group. You're a developer. And you need insights.

You could be writing Cloud Code. You could be writing Canva. And you're just going to call our MCP server, ask your questions, and we're going to bring the insights right where you are. And so the future for us will be all about this.

Everything you will see is about hygienic insights for builders and creators. And these changes we've made in R and D, they're working. So the last, I'd say sixty days even, we have burned down our processes. So our old, rigid, robust, agile methodologies, we said out the window they go.

No more. They don't make sense. And we unleashed our talent and said, go for it. And what we saw was we had some small teams of people who write immediately.

They were able to get work done at a pace we never thought possible. So this MCP server that we released last week for user testing, and the one we released for user interviews, had we worked our old way, there's no way they would have been released. But they are released, and they are real. Every single week when I talk with our CTO, he's got some piece of good news for me.

And so what I can tell you is is that some of these things that you've all wanted for a while, they are coming and they're coming fast. If you've needed some of those advanced quantitative capabilities, some of the reasons maybe you still go over and use something like a Qualtrics, those things will progressively come out throughout the summer. If you're on an old user Zoom and you wanted to get to user testing, we're going to make that really easy for you. And there's countless examples just like that.

And it also includes some of our new ideas. So whether it's the AI prompt based testing, the MCP server, or another one I get asked about a lot is AI moderated.

We will have our AI moderated in our capability set by the end of Q3. Now likely it's going to initially start on a partner approach, and then we'll move forward from there. But we will have AI moderated that works seamlessly with user testing this coming quarter.

Now overall, I am just super pleased on our direction and what we're doing. The bottom line here, and I and I like to think about this, build fast, build right, and deliver the outcomes that matter. That's what we're doing. That's what you'll see. And I'm pleased to hand the ball over now to Bahran, is going to come up, talk a little bit about the future of our industry, and then we're going get into some demos and go deep on the platform. Thank you.