When we launched our first user conference under the name Innovation, it reflected where the industry was: still figuring out how to collect employee feedback at scale. When we named it INSIGHTS, that reflected an industry that had learned to generate data but was still searching for meaning in it. Now, with the conference renamed to EX:ACT, we're marking the moment the industry finally caught up to what our customers have been telling us for years: knowing what's wrong isn't the hard part anymore. Doing something about it is.
EX:ACT takes place May 14 at Convene - Willis Tower in Chicago — and yes, we picked one of the tallest buildings on the planet on purpose. If we're going to talk about raising the standard for employee experience, we should probably do it from 1,400 feet up.
This name change captures the structural shift in what HR leaders need from their listening programs.
Perceptyx's 2025 State of Employee Listening research makes the case clearly. While 71% of employees say their organization shares survey results and 59% say action plans get created, only 51% report seeing actual improvements from their feedback. That 20-point drop between "we made a plan" and "something changed" represents the central failure point of the modern employee experience function.
That gap carries real consequences. The organizations still treating listening as a standalone exercise are contributing to, not solving, this problem. Our own data backs this up, too: organizations with mature listening-and-action programs are 6x more likely to exceed their financial targets than those without. The difference between the top and bottom performers is how fast and consistently they act on the data they collect.
The name is intentional at every level:
EX represents the three dimensions of what we're building toward: Experience (the full employee lifecycle), Employee (the individual, not just the aggregate), and Excellence (measurable, sustained performance improvement).
ACT represents what the industry needs most: Action (closing the gap between insight and outcome), Activation (enabling behavior change at scale through tools like Activate), and Accountability (tying EX investments to business results that executives can measure).
Together, the name carries a dual meaning: to act on employee experience, and to do so with exact, intentional precision. This aligns directly with Perceptyx's product trajectory, from our recognition as an EX Leader in the 2025 Forrester Wave to the launch of our Autonomous EX vision — a platform architecture designed to move organizations from systems that report on problems to systems that solve them.
For those who've attended INSIGHTS in previous years — whether in New York, London, Atlanta, San Francisco, or Chicago — EX:ACT is the same flagship user conference. The networking, the customer presentations, and the product previews are all still here. What's changed is the organizing principle.
Every session, every speaker, and every product discussion will orient around a single question: What did you do with what you learned, and what happened next?
That means more customer stories focused on outcomes, not just survey design. More time spent on activation strategies that scale through managers and teams. And more visibility into how Perceptyx's listening platform and AI Agents are helping organizations compress the time between hearing feedback and producing measurable change.
Our 2025 EX IMPACT Award winners offer a compelling preview of what this looks like in practice: Amtrak achieved a 95% retention rate and cut $2 million in hiring costs by acting on feedback across a 23,000-person workforce — 80% of whom are frontline workers with limited digital access. Advocate Health consolidated 250 survey questions down to 49 while training 6,000 leaders on action planning. And Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages achieved a 19.2% increase in engagement favorability through AI-assisted nudges via Activate.
Save-the-Date emails for EX:ACT are already hitting inboxes. We'll be sharing more about the speaker lineup, session tracks, and registration details in the coming weeks.
In the meantime, if you want to explore how Perceptyx is helping organizations close the gap between listening and acting, schedule a conversation with our team.