SurveyMonkey has rebuilt its platform for the first time in a major way since the company started in 1999. The update, called Today's SurveyMonkey, is built around AI tools for writing survey questions and reading through the answers. CEO Eric Johnson says the goal is speed: building and sending out a quarterly employee survey used to take 77 clicks, and now takes 6.
The new version lets users type plain instructions to an AI to draft a survey instead of building one question by question. It also connects directly to ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, with a link to Google's Gemini on the way, so people can create or read survey results without leaving those apps. SurveyMonkey is also linking up with workplace systems like Workday and BambooHR, so an employee survey can automatically split results by department, office location, or years on the job.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. A growing group of startups now sell what is called synthetic survey data: AI models trained to guess how a group of people would answer a question, without ever asking a real person. Many synthetic data providers claim their AI-generated insights can replace traditional survey respondents, offering consumer insights that are faster, cheaper, and potentially even more accurate. That is a direct threat to a company whose whole business is collecting answers from actual humans.
At the same time, a messier problem is eating away at survey data from the other direction. Bots and people using AI to breeze through surveys for a quick reward are flooding real panels with junk answers. Studies show up to 40% of survey responses from panel providers are low-quality, and in extreme cases, over 70% can be outright fraudulent. Research panel bots, automated scripts that impersonate real respondents, are sophisticated enough to dodge attention-checks, mimic human timing, and even pass open-ended traps, infiltrating surveys to claim incentives at scale. So the same AI wave that SurveyMonkey is using to make surveys faster to build is also making it harder to trust who actually answered them.
This is also a company trying to prove itself again after a rough few years. When SurveyMonkey filed to go public in 2018, it was valued at $2 billion. Since then, it remained stuck at around 330,000 organizational domains, and the value dropped, and the company got caught in a failed buyout attempt by Zendesk in 2022. The maker of SurveyMonkey, Momentive Global, was sold to Symphony Technology Group in a deal valued at approximately 1.5 billion dollars in 2023, taking it off the public market entirely. Eric Johnson took over as CEO right after that deal closed, and this redesign is his clearest statement yet of what he thinks the company is actually worth protecting.
Johnson's bet is that the value is not the AI writing assistant, since any company can wire that up. It is the 25 years of survey data and benchmark scores SurveyMonkey has collected, which competitors and AI companies cannot simply copy. If he is right, the winners in this space will not be whoever ships the flashiest AI feature, but whoever can prove their answers actually came from real people. For any business that runs employee or customer surveys, that is the question worth asking before trusting a result: was a person really on the other end of it, and does the vendor have a real way of checking.