Perceptyx new CEO: ‘EX is non-negotiable’ but ‘just aggregating data through surveys isn’t driving change’

In April this year, Ross Wainwright joined employee experience (EX) giant Perceptyx as CEO.

To mark his six-month milestone at the helm of the $100 million-revenue EX company, Wainwright sat down with UNLEASH for an exclusive interview.

Having held C-Suite roles at Alida, Dimension Data and SAP, Wainwright has expertise across both EX and customer experience (CX).

In his view, what makes Perceptyx special is that it is “purely an EX play”.

According to analysts like IDC, Forrester, and Gartner, Perceptyx is a top EX provider, and for Wainwright, the key is that “we’re not a CX company”.

He sees Perceptyx’s CX competition as “selling fries with their hamburgers” – EX is not their core business, and it is “rubbish” to say that “a world-class EX strategy starts with world-class CX”; “I spent a ton of time in CX, there’s no correlation”.

For him, merging EX and CX benefits “everybody other than the employees”.

Wainwright shares that Perceptyx is seeing customers who left for the “French Fry CX option” boomeranging and coming back for a pure EX product.

One anecdote he tells UNLEASH is that a Fortune 50 company with 500,000 employees replaced a major CX provider with Perceptyx – “they said they had seen more business value in the last three hours working with Perceptyx than over the last 18 months with the large CX vendor”.

There is clear recognition that “EX is non-negotiable” in this economic situation – “you have to make the investment to listen to your people – it’s an absolutely mandatory requirement”, Wainwright tells UNLEASH.

Perceptyx, AI agents and the future of EX

The EX space has seen $6 billion of investment in the last decade, but to continue with this momentum, ongoing innovation is needed.

“Just aggregating data through surveys isn’t driving change,” Wainwright tells UNLEASH.

Ross Wainwright, CEO, Perceptyx.

Instead, there’s a need to embrace continuous listening.

Target, one of Perceptyx’s customers, was the first to talk to Wainwright about this concept – “rather than aggregating the EX data as an event – a pulse survey, a census survey, an anniversary survey – we want constant feedback”.

The only way to do this is to leverage AI – something Perceptyx has long been doing through its ‘Activate’ product.

The EX giant is now innovating further by launching a suite of AI agents. The agents include Employee Activation, Conversational Listening, and Narrative Analysis.

Employee Activation builds on Perceptyx’s ‘Activate’ product and is an AI coach full of behavioral nudges, while Conversational listening is about moving beyond static surveys to true two-conversations in real-time.

Narrative Analysis is about better uncovering insights from conversational and unstructured data, with the aim of enabling more data-driven decision-making.

We believe that we have the competitive advantage to leverage AI”, but Wainwright is clear that “this is not a roll out in AI to reduce headcount”.

“We want AI to really engage the resources within our customers’ organizations to go and drive business value, drive measurable impact, drive action,” he adds.

“HR executives have the same responsibility as all business leaders” – they need to be able to quantify the impact of EX to their C-Suite.

This is a focus that Wainwright has brought in his six months tenure to date at Perceptyx: “Rather than just looking at the soft side of behavioral change with our product, why not look at the business implications?”

Ultimately, “we want to drive performance, engagement and impact through the HR function” for Perceptyx’s 600 customers worldwide. These include 35% of the Fortune 500 and 50% of the Fortune 100; standout brands like Prudential, Comcast, MGM Resorts, Zurich Insurance, Swarovski, Keurig Dr Pepper, and Medtronic.

Continued innovation remains on Wainwright’s agenda as Perceptyx CEO – you can learn more about the EX giant’s experience-aware AI at UNLEASH World 2025 in Paris, 20 to 22 October.