The Head and the Heart: Why the Giants Are Building for Scale, While We’re Building for Meaning.

A perspective from James Warren, Founder and CEO, and Andy Sitison, Chief Technology Officer of Share More Stories and the SEEQ Platform

Have you seen James’ recent video talking about a pivotal moment early in Share More Stories’ journey, when he realized that stories as insight was about to be the path for the company? Or what about Andy’s recent video talking about how SEEQ Platform helps leaders connect with their employees and customers, and fuels his passion for keeping humans at the center of tech? If not, keep reading, but when you can, take a moment to come back and check them out. They’ll help you understand why we say what we’re about to say.

Earlier this month, Qualtrics announced it’s acquiring Press Ganey Forsta for $6.75 billion – one of the largest deals on record in the human experience insights and experience management industries. Press Ganey Forsta had already acquired InMoment earlier this year, expanding its footprint in real-time listening and cross-industry analytics.

Here’s our take: together, these moves signal something much bigger than a merger. They show where the experience world is headed: toward massive consolidation, automation, and scale. The biggest players are racing to own every data point, every voice, every signal — building AI systems that can measure and predict human behavior at an unprecedented level.

It’s an extraordinary feat. But it also confirms something we’ve believed for a long time.

The future of this industry won’t be defined by who measures the most. It will be defined by who understands the most.

Most of today’s human experience insights solutions focus on metrics, not emotions, leaving customers and employees feeling unheard and misunderstood.

And when people feel unheard and misunderstood, guess what? They disengage.

This leaves businesses missing opportunities to create better experiences that fuel growth – because the information they need is hidden behind a veil of distrust, a lack of belonging, and a need for leaders to listen to what really matters.

At Share More Stories, we’ve spent the past decade helping organizations listen to people differently. Not just through surveys or ratings, but through their stories — the words, emotions, and experiences that reveal how people actually feel and why they feel that way. 

Listening with their heads and their hearts. 

Because some things you can count don’t tell you all that much, and some things employees and customers can tell you are hard to count.

Until the creation of the SEEQ Platform. 

We use stories to surface meaning, to help organizations learn from lived experience and lead with empathy. We turn human experience into insight and understanding that leaders can act on — the kind that builds belonging, trust, and stronger communities.

So when we read about the Qualtrics + Press Ganey Forsta deal, we didn’t see a threat. We saw a huge blinking, blaring signal – and a major opportunity for Share More Stories and our SEEQ Platform.

It tells us that the market for experience insights, analytics and intelligence is expanding faster than ever — that people and organizations everywhere are hungry for better ways to understand each other. It tells us that quantitative measurement is reaching its limit, and that the next wave of innovation will come from those who can bring human context back into the equation. Bring real meaning to phrases like “human-led AI” and “human-in-the-loop AI.” 

There’s that word again. Meaning. That’s where we live.

The giants are building AI systems for efficiency. We’re building AI systems for empathy and deep experiential context — tools that don’t just collect data, but connect people. Tools that go beyond analyzing experiences, to help leaders and organizations act on what matters most.

We see this every day. In a pilot with YMCA leaders, we’ve seen how stories help reveal the drivers of relationships and belonging. In our work focused on older adults and caregiving experiences, we’ve seen how emotional insights drive better experience design. In health and wellness, we’ve seen how closely tied employee experience and customer experience really are – and how listening deeply rebuilds trust in institutions. And across purpose-driven companies, we’ve seen how employee and customer stories help reconnect culture and brand to each other and to the mission. This is the power of engagement-driven insights that are based in story, and developed through scalable, human-led AI.

These are not just anecdotes. They’re signals — stories as data that show us what people need to feel seen, valued, and supported.

We see this as the future of human experience insights and experience management. We don’t need to compete with the giants. We’re here to complement them. (In fact, they need us to complement them! Because our role is to make sense of what all that data means — to translate human experience into human understanding.)

Because at the end of the day, numbers can tell you a lot about what’s happening, but stories tell you why it matters.

If you’re using Qualtrics or Forsta or InMoment right now, great! That means you already value employee and customer experiences. Now let us help you get more out of all that data, by seeing and listening to humans differently. By connecting measurement to meaning, and stories to strategy. 

If you’re ready to explore what empathy at scale looks like, let’s connect. Schedule time here: https://calendly.com/james-sms/30min

In a world that’s measuring everything, meaning might just be the most valuable data of all.

—

James Warren, Founder & CEO, Share More Stories and Andy Sitison, Chief Technology Officer, Share More Stories