PROVO — Utah’s customer experience giant Qualtrics just added Hollywood star Matthew McConaughey to an already loaded slate of A-list speakers for its upcoming user summit.
The announcement follows news that former first lady Michelle Obama, talk show icon Ellen DeGeneres, “Fixer Uppers” Joanna and Chip Gaines, skateboarding legend Tony Hawk and many more will appear over the four-day event in March.
The company has made booking apex celebrities part of its modus operandi for the annual event, which draws over 10,000 attendees.
The 2019 edition featured former President Barack Obama; talk show host and media mogul Oprah Winfrey; billionaire business mogul and founder of Virgin Group, Sir Richard Branson; movie star, tech investor and philanthropist Ashton Kutcher; NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and others.
Qualtrics co-founder and CEO Ryan Smith told the Deseret News ahead of last year’s summit that he and his team seek out speakers more for their ability to share world-class experiences than just for name recognition.
“I think our speakers are all great examples of people who have made huge impacts on experience,” Smith said.
And when it comes to the company’s mission statement, nobody explains it better than Smith himself.
“Our mission is to help organizations deliver the experiences that turn their customers into fanatics, employees into ambassadors, products into obsessions and brands into religions,” Smith said last year.
Qualtrics was founded in 2002 by Ryan and Jared Smith based on technology first developed by Ryan and his father, BYU researcher and professor Scott Smith, amid the elder Smith’s successful fight against throat cancer. Initially conceived as a tool for academics, the company and its platform has since evolved into a tech behemoth that leverages survey input and a business analytics engine to let its clients — now numbering over 11,000 — know exactly how well, or not, their companies are performing.
It’s been just over a year since Qualtrics was acquired in a mammoth, $8 billion deal by European software giant SAP, and the company has been on an expansion tear since then.
Last year saw Qualtrics announcing a series of new offices and expansions around the world. In September, the company unveiled the Qualtrics Tower co-headquarters project in Seattle, which spans 275,000 square feet and will become the eventual home for more than 2,000 employees. In October, Qualtrics announced a new office building in Dublin where the company will create 350 additional jobs, doubling the number of employees in that region to more than 700. And in November, the company announced a new 25,000-square-foot office in Chicago that will house 200 employees along the city’s riverfront.
The company currently has 25 offices around the world with over 3,000 employees and plans to grow to more than 8,000 employees by 2023. Qualtrics serves more than 11,000 organizations in over 100 countries.