UserTesting Acquires User Interviews, Betting Big on Human Insights for AI

BELLEVUE, Wash. – January 07, 2026 – In a landmark move set to reshape the customer insights industry, UserTesting today announced its acquisition of User Interviews, the market's leading platform for participant recruitment. The deal combines UserTesting's enterprise-grade insights platform with User Interviews' vast and diverse participant marketplace, creating a comprehensive, end-to-end solution designed to meet the growing demand for high-quality human feedback in the age of artificial intelligence.

The strategic acquisition unites two major forces in the user research space. UserTesting, trusted by over 3,000 customers including 75 of the Fortune 100, is known for its powerful platform that helps companies gather and analyze customer feedback. User Interviews brings to the table a highly-regarded recruitment engine and access to a network of over six million participants, specializing in sourcing niche consumer groups, B2B professionals, and other hard-to-reach audiences.

“As companies reimagine their products and experiences to win in the AI era, the need for trusted customer insights has never been greater,” said Eric Johnson, CEO of UserTesting, in the official announcement. “By bringing UserTesting and User Interviews together, we’re creating the fastest and most reliable way for teams to understand their customers and make better, smarter decisions with confidence.”

Reshaping the User Research Landscape

This acquisition is more than a simple merger; it signals a significant consolidation in the rapidly evolving Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market for user research. For years, companies have navigated a fragmented landscape of tools, often piecing together solutions for participant recruitment, testing, and analysis. This move by UserTesting aims to eliminate that friction by creating a one-stop shop for human insight.

The combination directly addresses one of the most persistent challenges in research: finding the right participants quickly and reliably. While UserTesting has its own global network, the integration of User Interviews' specialized panel dramatically expands its capabilities. The new entity now boasts unparalleled reach, from general consumers to highly specific B2B professionals and domain experts, a critical asset for companies conducting nuanced research.

This strategic alignment positions the combined company ahead of competitors, many of whom specialize in either the technology platform or the recruitment process, but rarely excel at both. By integrating these two functions, UserTesting is betting that a seamless, all-in-one workflow will become the new industry standard, forcing competitors like dscout, Respondent.io, and even components of larger platforms like Qualtrics to re-evaluate their market position. The move transforms a key competitor in the recruitment space into a core asset, effectively absorbing a significant portion of the market.

Fueling the AI Era with Human Data

The timing and framing of the acquisition are explicitly tied to the explosion of artificial intelligence. The press release emphasizes that the combined solution is built for the “AI era,” a claim rooted in the fundamental need for vast amounts of high-quality human data to develop, train, and validate AI models. As companies race to deploy AI, they face the risk of building systems on biased or incomplete data, leading to products that are ineffective, unfair, or misaligned with user needs.

This is where the acquisition becomes a strategic masterstroke. User Interviews’ ability to recruit diverse and precisely targeted participants provides the raw material needed for robust AI development. This includes processes like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), where human preferences are used to fine-tune AI models. By providing a scalable pipeline to authentic human perspectives, UserTesting is positioning itself as a critical infrastructure provider for ethical and effective AI.

This is not a sudden pivot for UserTesting, which has been steadily integrating AI into its own platform since 2019. Its existing AI-powered features, such as AI Insight Summary for synthesizing video feedback and automatic friction detection, are now supercharged by the ability to source ideal participants on demand. The acquisition allows UserTesting to offer its enterprise clients a holistic solution: not only the tools to analyze feedback with AI, but also the premier network to source the human data that makes that AI meaningful.

A Streamlined Path from Recruitment to Insight

For the designers, researchers, product managers, and marketers on the front lines of product development, the merger promises a more efficient and powerful workflow. The integration, which already existed in a more limited capacity between the two platforms, is expected to become seamless, allowing teams to move from defining a target audience to generating actionable insights faster than ever before.

“We started User Interviews to help organizations hear from the people that matter most to their businesses,” noted Basel Fakhoury, CEO of User Interviews. “Combining User Interviews’ panel capabilities with UserTesting’s platform gives enterprises a more scalable, trusted way to access the right audiences and turn insights into action.”

The combined offering touts several key benefits for customers. These include precise targeting across rich demographic and behavioral segments, proprietary fraud prevention to ensure data quality, and the ability to rapidly scale studies from a handful of qualitative interviews to large-scale quantitative research. This agility is crucial in modern, fast-paced development cycles where quick, iterative feedback is essential.

By uniting a best-in-class recruitment engine with a top-tier insights platform, the company aims to abstract away the logistical complexities of research. This allows teams to focus less on the operational overhead of finding participants and more on the strategic work of understanding them, ensuring that the voice of the customer is embedded in every decision, from minor product tweaks to major AI deployments. The move underscores a powerful truth in modern technology: the most advanced algorithms are only as good as the human understanding that informs them.