Medallia’s Experience ’26 Conference Advances AI-Driven Topic Modeling and Embedded Action Planning
Medallia unveiled its updated product roadmap at Experience ’26, the company’s flagship conference held February 10-12, 2026. Announcements centered on five product capabilities, building on Medallia’s Frontline-Ready AI initiative launched at Experience ’25. While last year’s conference focused on using AI to improve customer experience beyond traditional surveys, Experience ’26 shifted to a specific operational claim: how reliably voice of the customer (VoC) platforms turn customer insights into practical actions.
More than 550 of Medallia’s largest enterprise customers have deployed its Frontline-Ready AI since launch. The installed base remains concentrated in industries where experience management programs are deeply embedded in operational workflows, such as financial services, hospitality, airlines, healthcare, and telecommunications. Medallia’s adoption figures sought to provide a credible baseline for their Experience ’26 product roadmap.
Experience ’26 Product Announcements
Medallia launched five principal capabilities:
- Smart Topic Builder: Uses generative AI to automatically identify, categorize, and surface emerging topics from unstructured customer feedback. Medallia emphasizes that users audit and approve AI-generated rules as part of the solution’s workflow, ensuring topic categorizations remain explainable and trustworthy.
- Insights Assistant: Enables users to query their organization’s experience data using natural language via a conversational AI interface. This capability represents a logical evolution from Ask Athena, Medallia’s earlier conversational analytics prototype demonstrated at Experience ’24.
- GenAI Language Expansion: Extends Medallia’s capabilities (specifically Intelligent Summaries, Root Cause Assist, and Smart Response) to French- and German-speaking teams. Support for Spanish was already announced in the Fall 2025 product release.
- Enhanced Action Planning: Allows teams to create and assign follow-up tasks from within a report; users can then track whether those tasks improve performance over time within the same platform. Notably, Medallia links specific actions and measurable shifts in experience metrics, such as Net Promoter Score and overall satisfaction, to show business value of experience management investments.
- Unified B2B Account Profiles: Centralizes business account-level health metrics alongside individual customer profiles within a single platform instance.
Our Take
Since going private with Thomas Bravo in 2021, Medallia has pursued a strategy of steady platform investment, strategic acquisitions (including Mindful for callback automation), and partnership expansion (notably integrations for AI agent orchestration with Adobe in September 2025 and Ada in January 2026). Experience ’26 followed this trend, showcasing a coherent and strategically disciplined product evolution rather than platform reinvention. However, this approach is showing signs of Medallia becoming a VoC market follower.
Insights Assistant, for instance, is a necessary release to maintain feature parity. Conversational querying of experience data using natural language has become a baseline expectation across the VoC platform landscape. Multiple competitors already offer comparable capabilities that allow users to query dashboards, summarize results, or generate recommendations through conversational interfaces. Additionally, language expansion and B2B account profiles are not strict differentiators, though important additions for Medallia users.
Enhanced Action Planning, while addressing the right problem, also faces an adoption question. The persistent challenge in the VoC market has been the inability to connect large volumes of insight to measurable operational changes in an organization. While Enhanced Action Planning is designed to close this gap, the question is whether enterprise organizations will adopt this capability as their primary execution mechanism. This feature risks becoming a supplement to existing workflows rather than a replacement for them – especially if teams continue to export insights into spreadsheets, email threads, or task management tools. For technology buyers evaluating this capability in particular, the broader consideration will be organizational culture and governance for supporting change management.
However, Smart Topic Builder does appear to be a meaningful differentiation for Medallia. Building, maintaining, and updating topic models has been one of the most resource-intensive pain points in VoC program management – a high-effort, high-overhead task, in which, as topic models become stale, the actionability of text analytics degrades; perceived ROI on VoC programs thus diminishes over time. If Smart Topic Builder performs as advertised, the effort involved would be dramatically reduced. However, buyers should ask Medallia to demonstrate how Smart Topic Builder handles topic drift in domains with rapidly evolving customer concerns, where issue taxonomies shift frequently.
Buyer evaluations should center on the following aspects of Medallia’s announcements:
- Prioritize evaluation of Smart Topic Builder and Enhanced Action Planning, as these address the two most persistent pain points in VoC program management: topic model maintenance and insight-to-action connections. Request proof-of-concept deployments that measure time savings on topic curation and track whether action plans launched within the platform result in metric improvements.
- Assess the competitive landscape carefully if the above two capabilities are not must-haves. Evaluate Medallia alongside comparable VoC platforms based on total platform breadth (including digital experience analytics, contact center intelligence, employee experience, and market research) rather than the strength of any individual AI feature. Medallia’s differentiation is strongest in omnichannel signal aggregation, text analytics, and deployment scalability.
- Monitor the cadence at which announced capabilities move from preview to general availability. Availability dates are not yet published.