Technology leader Gurdeep Singh Pall, a longtime Microsoft executive, is joining experience management technology company Qualtrics as its first president of artificial intelligence strategy.
Pall left Microsoft last fall after a 33-year career that spanned from Windows NT to Microsoft Teams, Lync, Skype, and Bing. He ultimately served as Microsoft’s head of business AI and product incubations.
As a Seattle-based executive for Qualtrics, he will lead the company’s AI initiatives, focusing on vision and strategy, and the prototyping of new AI technologies and features in its products.
Pall will be a member of the Qualtrics senior leadership team, as an advisor to CEO Zig Serafin, working on AI initiatives in collaboration with the company’s technology and product teams.
“Qualtrics has the largest database in the world of human sentiment,” Pall said in an interview with GeekWire. “This gives them a very unique and powerful place in the world of AI, because we are seeing one of the most fundamental transformations in human-machine interaction.”
Qualtrics, based in Provo, Utah, and Seattle, offers technology that helps companies gather data and improve the experiences and interactions that customers, employees, and others have with their products and services.
Pall left Microsoft last year during a period of transition for members of his family. He said he was attracted to the opportunity at Qualtrics to work on new businesses and areas of growth.
As an example of how AI could be used as part of experience management, Pall cited the potential for learning a customer’s preferences over time from their interactions with a company’s products and services, allowing those experiences to be adapted for individual customers.
On the Qualtrics leadership team, he joins former Microsoft executives including Serafin and Brad Anderson, the company’s president of products, UX, engineering, and ecosystem. Anderson and Serafin each worked at the Redmond company for more than 17 years.
Pall is one of several former Microsoft executives now working in AI roles at different companies. Other recent examples include Lila Tretikov, the former Microsoft deputy chief technology officer, who joined Silicon Valley investment firm NEA as partner and head of AI strategy; and Vahé Torossian, former Microsoft corporate vice president of business applications now president and chief partner officer at Builder.ai.
