Skanska, a global development and construction firm, announced last week a 275,000 square-foot lease with Qualtrics. Qualtrics will lease 13 floors at the firm’s 2+U, which includes a 38-story, Class-A+ office tower, along with 17,000 square feet of local retail and arts-and-culture space. The office portion of 2+U will now be known as “Qualtrics Tower” and is 100% leased.

Qualtrics is expected to occupy the tower beginning summer 2020, once tower construction is completed. Other tenants taking up the rest of the 25 stories include Indeed.com, Dropbox, Inc., and a flex office/co-working firm called Spaces.

With the expansion, Qualtrics co-founder and CEO Ryan Smith said the company plans to create more than 1,500 new jobs in the Seattle region.

“We’re excited for Qualtrics Tower to be the new home base of our co-headquarters. Qualtrics is changing the way organizations across the world manage and improve their customer experience,” Smith said. “We are deepening our investment in Seattle, which has some of the best talent in the world.”

The Qualtrics Tower is located in the heart of downtown Seattle, adjacent to Seattle Art Museum and Benaroya Hall, and lifted 85 feet off the ground at the highest point to create the “outdoor urban village” under the building that will house retail, arts and culture space.

“We’re very proud to now have all 2+U’s office space fully leased before we officially complete construction, and we’re equally proud of the caliber of innovative companies that will bring this beautiful building to life,” Murphy McCullough, executive vice president and regional manager for Skanska’s commercial development operations, said. “As a leading technology company experiencing significant growth, we’re thrilled Qualtrics will call 2+U home.”

The expansion announcement comes a week after Qualtrics announced new capabilities in its customer experience management software, “Smart Conversations.” Built directly into the Qualtrics XM Platform, the artificial intelligence powered feedback enables organizations to make feedback more personalized and actionable with conversational experiences created by real-time topic and sentiment analysis from open text comments, according to a press release.

“Smart Conversations transform the feedback experience, deliver deeper insights and help organizations close experience gaps,” said Kelly Waldher, executive vice president of Research Core, Qualtrics. “With these conversational listening capabilities, organizations can deliver a superior experience by ensuring their customers are heard through the feedback process, they are participating in meaningful conversations with their users on product improvement ideas and have happier, more engaged employees by honing in directly on the issues most impacting their experience.”

Qualtrics has more than 10,000 clients around the world using the Qualtrics XM Platform. Learn more by visiting the Qualtrics website.