We Took a Big Swing. Now Discuss is a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Experience Research Platforms, Q1 2026

By Adam Mertz, Chief Strategy Officer, Discuss

A couple of years ago, we made a call: the way experience research gets done — the tools, the workflows, the timelines — wasn’t keeping up with the speed of decision-making in modern organizations.

So we took a swing and we rolled up our sleeves because we believed now was the time to challenge the research status quo.

We bet on AI not as a gimmick, but as an enabler. We doubled down on innovation that drove real ROI, where the latest technologies could be used to bring better, deeper, human understanding at a scale never seen before. This wasn’t about a specific feature or a product, but rather reimagining the research lifecycle.

With today’s announcement, we believe that our bet and all of that incredible teamwork, collaboration, and commitment from across every team at our company was acknowledged in a meaningful way.

Discuss has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Experience Research Platforms, Q1 2026 — The Eight Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up.

We also received the highest possible scores (5.0) across 15 of the 31 criteria. spanning both the Current Offering and Strategy categories, including:

• Live interviews
• AI-powered research methods
• Data analysis
• Roadmap
• Innovation

According to Forrester’s evaluation:

“Discuss is a great fit for companies seeking robust AI capabilities that enable them to scale qualitative research globally.”

The Forrester report also notes:

“The platform’s strong AI features, such as its AI assistant and AI-moderated interviews, support the end-to-end research process and make global research and analysis efficient and impactful.”

We’re proud of this recognition. But we’re even prouder of how we got here.

A Platform Built With a Purpose

Back in 2020, when I joined Discuss, we were a small-but-mighty team with a belief that there was a better way to do research. As Chief Growth Officer at the time, I had a unique vantage point across product, marketing, and sales. It meant I got to hear customer pain points firsthand  and direct the innovation of our solution in real time.

The friction researchers faced and what that friction cost stood out more than anything. Delayed decisions. Lost momentum. Missed opportunities.

We didn’t want to add one more tool to the pile. We wanted to rethink the stack, powered by GenAI.

So we started by building Genie, our first AI assistant, to make analysis and synthesis faster without losing the “why.” We were the first of any vendor on the market with a tangible solution. But that was just the start. We rolled out AI-moderated interviews to give teams more flexibility in how and when they gather insights. We defined our vision, focused our innovation and executed against a roadmap that led us to delivering three AI agents: a Project agent, Interview Agent, and Insights Agent. (There’s one more agent coming soon but I’ll leave that as a surprise for the near future.)

And we didn’t stop at AI. We focused just as much on improving the experience of human-led research, because empathy can’t be automated.

Then last fall came a major step forward: bringing quant and qual together under one roof through our merger with Voxco. One platform. One data set. One story. 

Challenging the Research Status Quo

What makes this recognition from Forrester meaningful to us isn’t just the scores. It’s what they reflect.

The Forrester Wave™: Experience Research Platforms, Q1 2026 states, “Discuss’ vision is to be an AI-centric platform for qualitative research at scale, with AI agents to guide and execute the entire research process.”

We believe that direction matters because AI alone isn’t the point. Speed alone isn’t the point. Trust is.

Yes, AI can move fast. But insight only matters if teams believe it, understand it, and can act on it with confidence.

When GenAI took the world by surprise a few years ago, every company in this market had access to the same exact opportunity using the same exact building blocks at the same exact time. 

Instead of getting caught up in releasing tech for tech’s sake, Discuss focused on scaling human empathy — listening harder, moving faster, and being clear about what actually helps teams deeply understand their audience so they can make better decisions, quickly. And never forcing a choice between AI- and human-led research. That focus shaped everything we built. Fast-forward to today. Discuss only one of two vendors recognized as a Leader in the report.

As Forrester’s analysis observed:

“Customers value the platform’s live interview capabilities and the quality of Discuss AI — particularly its AI-driven analysis and AI-moderated interviews — and expect continued innovation in these areas

Our reimagining of the research lifecycle continues. In the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing more how we’ll be enabling companies to discover themes, ideas and to categorize customer perspectives across any of their systems – from Google reviews, within social media systems, customer communities, etc. — and to be able to do that as a layer that effectively sits above the research lifecycle and in fact will feed off of the research being done, whether quantitative or qualitative.

What This Means for You

If you’re already a Discuss customer, you’ve seen this play out in real time: faster turnarounds, smarter synthesis, and more room for strategy instead of setup. This recognition only sharpens our urgency to keep innovating and to keep earning that trust.

If you’re not a customer yet and you’re feeling the latency in your current research stack, now is a good time to take another look. Expectations for insight have changed. Business cycles are shorter. Budgets are tighter. And the bar for confidence is higher.

Whether you’re running global qualitative research at scale, democratizing research across teams, or just trying to get unblocked faster, we’re here to help.

One Last Thing

A huge thank you to the customers who’ve been on this journey with us. You’ve pushed us to think bigger, move faster, and build better. This recognition is as much yours as it is ours.

And to the Discuss team — across product, engineering, customer success, and beyond — thank you. You’re truly building something remarkable.

Want to see what a Leader platform looks like?
Download the full The Forrester Wave™: Experience Research Platforms, Q1 2026 — The Eight Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up report here.

Disclaimer:
The Forrester Wave™: Experience Research Platforms, Q1 2026 is © Forrester Research, Inc. All rights reserved. Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrester’s objectivity here.