The next generation of Walker

Key takeaways

• AI isn't just changing how we work—it's changing what clients need from us, and we're rebuilding around that now.
• The tools that win will bring companies closer to their customers, not further away.
• A new brand, tagline and AI-ready data stack mark the next chapter of an 87-year habit: evolving before the industry requires it.

Walker has spent 87 years shaping how businesses understand their customers. The next 87 won't look anything like the last.

AI won't just change how we do the work, it's changing what our clients need from us. We're rebuilding around that now—turning customer data into action before the moment passes instead of after.

For our clients, that's the point of all of it. Not faster dashboards. Faster answers—closing the gap between what a customer experiences and what a business does about it.

That's exactly the kind of change Walker was built for. This isn't the first shift Walker has led through. It won't be the last.

We weren't built to stay in one lane. We were built to evolve—and every era of this company has been a bet on what's coming next, not a defense of what already worked.

In 1939, that meant going door-to-door with a clipboard to find out whether radio ads were landing—then building the first customer test kitchen in the nation, where companies like Procter & Gamble and Kimberly-Clark could watch real people react to their products in real time. In the decades since, that same instinct moved us from telephone surveys to web-based data collection to full customer experience consulting—each shift made before the industry required it, not after.

Now the shift is AI and agentic technology, and it's the biggest one yet.

Walker is designing the AI and agentic tools organizations will use to act on customer data in real time—on a data stack that already unifies behavioral, operational and experience data in one place, with enterprise-grade security built in.

That's where this is headed industry-wide. AI and agentic technology are already reshaping how organizations collect, process and act on customer data—faster and at greater scale than any previous shift. Done well, it means real-time insight and action happening in the moment instead of being presented in quarterly reports. Done carelessly, it means companies automate their way further from the humans they're supposed to understand. We think the organizations that thrive will be the ones that use these tools to get closer to their customers, not further away.

"Most organizations don't have a data problem," Walker president Jack Walker said on a recent episode of Get IN. with Nate Spangle (Apple Podcasts). "They have a connection problem."

As Jack put it in the same conversation, "We've always been helping companies understand their customers better and use that insight to create a better customer experience. It just looks a little different for how we do it."

The question we've always answered—what do your customers actually experience—is about to matter more than it ever has, because the technology to act on the answer, in the moment, finally exists.

In 87 years, we've never once been the same company for a full decade. Economic downturns, technological revolutions, entire industry shifts—each one changed us, because we let it.

In thirteen years, Walker turns 100. We're not waiting to get there to figure out what the next 87 years looks like. 

We're building it now.