SurveyMonkey is rolling out one of the most significant updates in its 26-year history, adding a suite of AI-powered tools designed to make creating and interpreting surveys faster and easier. The revamped platform, billed as Today's SurveyMonkey, includes a streamlined interface, an enhanced home page with personalized recommendations, and upgraded AI features that can draft questionnaires from plain-language prompts and highlight key findings as responses arrive.
CEO Eric Johnson said the company remains focused on helping customers collect feedback from real people, even as a growing number of startups offer AI tools that extract sentiment from existing data or generate synthetic survey responses. “I think that more than ever, the feedback from people—from humans—matters in making good decisions,” Johnson said in an interview. The company, which promotes itself as the world's most popular survey platform, is betting that reducing the friction of building and deploying surveys will encourage more businesses to listen to their customers and employees.
The update comes with a notable simplification of the survey creation process. Johnson said building and deploying a quarterly employee engagement survey previously required 77 clicks, a number now reduced to six. The company hopes this ease of use will address a gap identified in its own research: while 83% of small business owners said customer feedback is useful for making decisions, only 54% collect it more than once or twice per year.
SurveyMonkey's AI tools build on an early version of its “Build with AI” feature launched in 2023, which was powered by OpenAI's GPT. Users can now design and analyze surveys from within other AI platforms, including ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, with a connector for Google's Gemini in development. The company is also introducing integrations with human resources information systems such as Workday and BambooHR, allowing businesses to target surveys to specific employee groups and augment responses with data like department, location, or tenure.
Johnson took over as CEO in 2023 after the company, then known as Momentive, was taken private in a $1.5 billion deal led by Symphony Technology Group. The acquisition followed an aborted takeover attempt by Zendesk the previous year. Upon taking the helm, Johnson pledged to make the core survey product “even better, easier to use, and more effective for every user.”
Later this year, SurveyMonkey plans to unveil a revamped version of its Benchmarks feature, which lets businesses compare their Net Promoter Scores and other feedback against similar organizations. The updated version will make it easier to understand how scores compare among businesses of similar industries, sizes, and geographies. Johnson said the goal is not just to expose the data but to explain what it means and what actions to take. The feature relies on SurveyMonkey's years of accumulated data, which Johnson described as “one of the largest data collections that's not included in any of the LLMs out there.”
The upgrades will begin rolling out this month across various plan levels. The company will track success by measuring how quickly users launch follow-up surveys and how frequently they share findings with teammates. “We want people to be thinking about this continuous listening opportunity in lots of different ways,” Johnson said. “Think about how they talk to their customers, how they talk to their employees, how they engage with the data, and importantly, what they do with that and how that evolves over time.”