What millions of questions reveal about what's next

“AI” and “uncertainty” were the top two trending survey topics in SurveyMonkey in 2026. Together, they tell a story about the year ahead: businesses adapting to constant change while figuring out how AI reshapes the way work gets done. 

SurveyMonkey Trends 2027, our second annual report on the top business trends to watch, looks at what those shifts mean for the workforce, customers, markets, and how businesses connect with people. 

We analyzed millions of surveys conducted by more than 260,000 organizations worldwide, looking at the surveys businesses deployed and the topics and keywords gaining momentum. The result is five signals about where business priorities are heading in 2027.

Here are five trends to watch.

After a volatile decade that saw employee feedback spike around workplace culture and inclusion, DEI-related surveys have settled back down to early 2010s levels.

And DEI isn't the only workplace measure declining. Employee engagement surveys fell 14% year-over-year, while surveys measuring supervisor effectiveness declined 54%. 

Rather than asking fewer questions, organizations have shifted their focus. 

As AI reshapes daily workflows, HR teams are reallocating survey bandwidth to workforce readiness, with surveys on skills training up 151% and AI tool access up 78%.

Our AI and Jobs research conducted in partnership with CNBC, shows employees are thinking about their skills, too. Nearly one-third (32%) have changed or reconsidered which skills they're developing because of AI. That rises to 45% among those currently in school.

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HR and people teams will have a lot to navigate in 2027. They’re asked to help employees build skills and track how the workforce is adapting, and an annual survey won't keep up with the pace of change. As roles, skills, and training needs change, always-on employee feedback can help teams identify what employees need and track how the workforce is adapting over time.

SurveyMonkey makes it easy to keep a pulse on your workforce. Start from a guided employee feedback program, use anonymity settings so employees tell you what's really happening, and let AI analysis pull themes and sentiment out of open-ended comments, so you bring leadership a clear story. 

"AI” was the #1 fastest-growing survey topic* in 2026, increasing 45% year-over-year. This is built on the momentum we saw last year, when AI-focused surveys grew 85% year-over-year.

But the bigger shift is in what businesses are asking about. Survey titles are moving from AI in general to specific tools and ways of working with it. 

Mentions of “Claude” increased 736%, “agentic” increased 459%, and “prompting” increased 116%. 

Our AI and Jobs Study shows AI becoming part of everyday work, too. Three in 10 workers now use AI daily, and how often people use it appears to be connected to how they feel about its impact.

Among daily AI users, 27% say AI makes their current job feel more secure, compared with 22% who say it makes their job feel less secure.

The picture changes among less frequent users. Among weekly users, 10% feel more secure while 25% feel less secure. Among those who use AI once a month or less, just 3% feel more secure compared with 24% who feel less secure.

The same pattern shows up when workers think about AI’s effect on the broader job market. Daily users are almost evenly split between optimism and pessimism, while less frequent users are much more likely to be pessimistic.

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As AI changes how people work, learning and development has to change with it, and you'll want proof that what you’re doing is working. 

Use SurveyMonkey AI to build a course evaluation survey in seconds, add a quiz to test what people retained (not just who showed up), and quickly spot skill gaps by team. Check in again at 30, 60, and 90 days to see if the learning stuck. 

YES Communities shows what that can look like in practice. The company uses SurveyMonkey across learning and development, onboarding, and employee feedback. Insights from its surveys led to changes including new training for its sales team, while its broader employee feedback program helped increase average employee retention from about 90 days to a year and a half.

After years of responding to one disruption after another – a pandemic, tariffs, shutdowns, extreme weather, war – now, it appears that businesses have accepted that uncertainty is just status quo. 

In fact, “uncertainty” related questions showed up across more surveys deployed in 2026, making it the second trending topic in our analysis, behind only “AI.”

At the same time, attention to individual disruptions declined. Tariff-related surveys fell 77% in 2026 while hurricane-related topics fell 91%.

Our recent small business research conducted in July 2026 further shows that leaders aren't expecting macro factors to disappear: 

The challenge for 2027 isn't predicting which disruption comes next. It's staying close enough to the market to adapt when conditions change.

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Run the same core questions on a schedule, so you can see when customer needs, brand perception, or competitive dynamics start to shift. This way, you can take action early. SurveyMonkey market research programs let you connect recurring surveys, such as NPS and brand loyalty, so you can easily compare each wave. 

And when there's a big decision you want to test before you commit, like a new price, message, or product concept, SurveyMonkey LaunchPad can help you get clarity fast. It packages proven methods into ready-to-run solutions—no research background required. 

NPS and customer satisfaction have long been standard ways to measure customer experience. But in 2026, businesses got more specific about the individual interactions behind those scores.

While traditional customer satisfaction survey deployments declined 20% year-over-year and NPS was essentially flat, more specific surveys went up, including measuring support agent helpfulness +342% and surveys focused on resolution efficiency +140%.

Instead of stopping at “How satisfied were you?”, businesses are digging into the interactions behind the score. Was it easy to get help? Was the issue resolved? Was the support actually useful?

That will matter even more in 2027, as AI continues to change how companies build products, handle support, and interact with customers. As those experiences evolve, businesses will need feedback closer to the moments that shape the customer experience.

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SurveyMonkey helps CX teams collect feedback at key moments across the customer journey. 

Ryanair puts this into practice at massive scale. Every passenger gets an opportunity to provide feedback after a flight, generating nearly 500,000 CSAT responses each month. The team uses SurveyMonkey and Power BI to dig into specific moments across the journey and has identified check-in and boarding pain points at individual airports, helping teams focus improvements where they're needed.

CX teams can build on that same idea with SurveyMonkey’s integrations and AI.

Mahjong is having a moment, and it's showing up in SurveyMonkey. “Mahjong” ranked #8 as the top trending word in survey titles in 2026. 

But the bigger trend isn't really about mahjong. It's about how people want to spend time together.

There is a rise in activity-based socializing, from game nights to run clubs, to classes and other unique experiences that give people something to do while they connect. These experiences make the activity itself the reason to show up.

In fact, SurveyMonkey's data reveals the focus teams had in getting people through the door. “Attendance confirmation” was the third-fastest trending survey topic of the year, just behind “AI” and “uncertainty.”

For marketers investing IRL events in 2027, the opportunity is creating experiences worth showing up for.

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Event feedback can start way before the event does. Use SurveyMonkey to send a pre-event survey to understand what your audience cares about —and shape your agenda accordingly.  Gather in-the-moment feedback throughout the experience to understand what will keep people coming back.

That's how Gen Con stays close to a community of more than 100,000 fans. The team uses SurveyMonkey to understand its audience and gather feedback from attendees, exhibitors, event hosts, and VIPs, using those insights to shape future programming and experiences.

Use SurveyMonkey to build events your audience actually wants to attend.

Here's what the five trends mean for your business in 2027:

No one can predict everything 2027 will bring. But businesses can stay close to the people who matter most. Continuous feedback helps you spot changing needs, challenge assumptions, and make more informed decisions along the way.

Methodology

SurveyMonkey internal data is based on English-language surveys deployed worldwide. The analysis compares survey activity from August 2, 2025–August 1, 2026 with August 2, 2024–August 1, 2025. 

SurveyMonkey topic is a predefined set of keywords and phrases used to identify surveys about a specific subject while filtering out unrelated uses of those terms.

DEI-related surveys are identified by survey titles containing terms related to diversity, equity and inclusion, including “bias,” “discrimination,” “diversity,” “equality,” “LGBTQ,” “inclusion” and “racial,” as well as titles containing both “diversity” and “equity” or “diversity” and “inclusion.”

The report also includes findings from SurveyMonkey original research conducted throughout 2026, with respondents selected from the more than 2 million people who take surveys on the SurveyMonkey platform each day.