US tech company Qualtrics is to establish an innovation hub at its expanded European headquarters in Dublin, focusing on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and other cutting-edge technology.
The new hub will help drive innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing and other technologies, bringing industry experts together to work on the future of Qualtrics’s experience management products.
Qualtrics provides cloud-based software that lets organisations create online surveys and track employee satisfaction and customer interactions.
Costello House in Dublin’s city centre is the company’s largest office in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and is expected to provide a base for the US company to grow internationally. The building is named after its first managing director in Ireland, Dermot Costello, who died from cancer in 2018, and includes a gym and pub for staff and an immersive executive briefing centre for customers.
The company employs close to 400 staff in Dublin and is continuing to hire. The new building gives Qualtrics the space to grow to about 500 employees. Qualtrics has also escaped the large-scale lay-offs that have hit other technology firms in recent months, a situation the company has attributed to prudent hiring.
The new office was opened by Qualtrics’s president of products and engineering, Brad Anderson. Mr Anderson said the access to talent in Ireland was “extraordinary”. The engineering team here is about 100 people, one of the largest outside the United States, contributing to the decision to locate the new innovation centre in Ireland.
“What we do as a company is we help organisations to be more human and build connections with their customers and with their employees. And with all of the innovations in AI and these large language models, there seem to hardly be a component of our product that is not using AI,” he said. “We’re going to really ramp up our AI efforts because we do have a very unique data set to train these models on.”
The centre will house a combination of engineers and product managers that are working with the engineers and user-experience designers, Mr Anderson said.
The opening of the new building was welcomed by Minister for Trade, Enterprise and Employment Simon Coveney. “Qualtrics is a world-renowned leader in experience management and this highlights that we are attracting the best companies to our shores,” he said.
Qualtrics was founded by brothers Ryan and Jared Smith along with their father Scott, and Stuart Orgill in Provo, Utah, in 2002. It opened its first office outside the US in Ireland in 2013.
