[Changelog] What's new with the Rally Agent and MCP

Wednesday July 22nd: Rally Agent + MCP: Beta is Live

The Rally Agent and Rally MCP are now live in Beta, and you can opt in today.

If this is your first time hearing about Rally Agent or Rally MCP, here's what you need to know.

Rally Agent is a new experience inside Rally, built for product builders. Instead of navigating the Rally Research app (which you’re likely pretty familiar with at this point!), your PMs and designers can chat directly with the Rally Agent and build their own studies within the guardrails you set. No training required, no research expertise assumed, no ability to go rogue.

Rally MCP takes that same capability outside Rally. It connects to AI tools your team already uses, like Claude or Cursor, so anyone can run research from inside their existing workflow (and within the guardrails you set) without ever opening Rally.

Two entry points. The same Rally research infrastructure underneath.

Built for research. Grounded in governance.

Rally Agent is built on the governance your research team has already established. Every action automatically follows your engagement rules, cooldown periods, consent requirements, contact limits, and approval workflows, so product teams can move quickly while Research Ops stays in control.

Rally Agent focuses on the operational work that slows research down. It helps teams create studies, recruit participants, schedule interviews, manage incentives, and handle the logistics that turn a research question into a completed session.

What's Rally Agent, and what's Rally MCP?

These are two different ways to run Research in Rally. Same research infrastructure underneath – 2 different entry points.

Rally Agent is built into your Rally workspace. Open it, type a request, it acts. No configuration required.

Rally MCP is a Model Context Protocol server. It connects Rally to MCP-compatible AI tools so you can drive research from inside Claude, build Rally into a custom agent, or embed it in a team workflow outside Rally's interface entirely.

Get started with the Rally Agent & MCP

Below is everything that's live across both the Agent and MCP, with a small set of MCP-only features noted separately.

❓ Ask questions about your research

Get instant answers without clicking through the app.

• "Who's booked this week?"

• "Are we on track to hit our participant target?"

• "What did P3 say about pricing in their session?"

• "Which studies are still in draft?"

• "Find customers in San Francisco who've shopped online in the last 30 days."

• "What needs my input across my studies?"

⚒ Build and launch a 1:1 interview study

End-to-end study setup, start to finish, in a conversation.

• "Set up an onboarding interview study."

• "Import this CSV and start a study with these people."

• "Add a screener question about company size."

• "Drop the age question from the screener."

• "Bump the incentive to $75 and change the duration to 45 minutes."

• "Attach our standard consent form."

• "Publish the onboarding study."

💬 Manage interviews

Run your full interview schedule without leaving your AI tool.

• "Reschedule Jane's interview to Thursday at 2pm."

• "Cancel tomorrow's session with Alyssa."

• "Book Adam for Tuesday at 2pm."

• "Move tomorrow's 2pm interview to Sarah."

• "Add Jamie as a guest to Friday's session."

• "Derek was a no-show, mark it."

• "Block my Fridays from the scheduler."

• "Prep me for my 3pm with Markus." (generates a full interview brief)

⚙ Handle participant logistics

Make one-off updates to your studies on the fly. 

• "Add 20 more people to the onboarding study."

• "Disqualify Mo from my study."

• "Show me Hector's screener responses."

🫡 Stay on top of recruiting

Watch invites and targeting in real time, and adjust the moment something's off.

• "Can we target 20 senior engineers in fintech from our existing panel?"

• "Approve the recruitment proposal for the onboarding study."

• "How many invites went out? Any bounces?"

• "Has Adam received my invitation email?"

• "Pause recruiting while we fix the screener."

💰 Manage incentives

Approve, adjust, and log payments without leaving the conversation.

• "Approve incentive sends for yesterday's interviews."

• "Resend Walter's gift card, it bounced."

• "Set up a $50 gift card as a custom incentive and log it as sent for Priya."

MCP-only (for now)

A small set of capabilities are available in the MCP but not yet in the in-app Agent:

• Create a new population or panel

• Look up custom person property definitions

• List and preview a study's email campaigns and templates

• View detailed consent form status and quota membership data per participant

Workflows to try first

Not sure where to start? Here are some examples to test out first: 

• Morning standup, AI-style "What interviews do I have today? What needs my input across my studies? Any recruiting decisions pending?"

• Build and launch a study in one go "Find customers in our panel who haven't participated in a study. Create an onboarding interview study with a screener that checks for relevant experience. Set the incentive to $75 for 45 minutes."

• Interview day, handled "Who am I talking to today? Pull their screener responses and prep me for each session." Then after each session: "Mark P1 as attended. Note that they raised pricing concerns. Approve their incentive."

• Recruiting health check "How's the onboarding study tracking? How many invites went out, how many opened, any bounces?"

• Reschedule with context "Reschedule my interview with Priya to Thursday at 2pm ET. Show me other available times first."

Coming very soon to Rally MCP 

• Surveys: Create and manage full survey studies end-to-end.

• Unmoderated tests: Set up and launch unmoderated test studies.

• External panel recruitment: Recruit through User Interviews and Respondent.

• Screener and survey response mapping: Automatically store participant answers in their person profile.

• Study collaborators: Add teammates to a study.

The Agent will follow as these capabilities land.

Ready to opt in?

The Beta is free through September 15. Opt in here.

Questions? Reach your CSM or drop us a note at support@rallyuxr.com. 

Friday July 31st: Every Study Type, Now in Rally MCP

One week into our Beta and we're already expanding the playbook with top requests 🔥 This week the Rally MCP added full lifecycle support for surveys and unmoderated tests. That means the three most common ways your teams run research are now available through the MCP: interviews, surveys, and unmoderated tests.

Create and launch Surveys via MCP 

You can now create, build, launch, manage, and close survey studies end-to-end through the Rally MCP. Write questions in a conversation, publish the study, read responses as they come in, and close it when you hit your target.

What's included:

• Create and configure a survey study

• Launch the survey

• Read responses as they arrive

• Pause, resume, or close the study at any time

• Use survey integrations (Google Forms, Typeform, etc.) in addition to building questions natively in Rally

Available in: Rally MCP today. Rally Agent coming soon.

Prompts to try this week: 

• "Create a survey about our new checkout flow with three questions: usability, pricing clarity, and an open text field."

• "What did people say on the checkout survey?"

• "Pause the checkout survey while we tweak a question."

• "Set up a survey for the Onboarding study using this Google Form link: [url]."

Create and launch Unmoderated Tests via MCP 

Unmoderated tests are the second most popular study type across Rally workspaces, and they're now fully supported via MCP. Point it at your Maze, UserTesting, Ballpark, or other external testing tool, draft custom messages, and launch. The MCP runs a safety check before go-live and blocks launch if anything critical is missing, so nothing ships half-finished. Monitor completions without logging into Rally Research. 

What's included:

• Create an unmoderated test with a link to your external tool

• Safe go-live validation (blocks launch if link or completion message is missing)

• Launch and monitor completions

• Pause, resume, or close the test

Available in: Rally MCP today. Rally Agent coming soon.

Prompts to try this week:

• “I want to test our new onboarding flow with 10 customers that recently signed up for our free trial. Help me set up an unmoderated test in Maze.”

• "How many people have completed the onboarding test?"

More changes that shipped this week

• Recruiting approval now happens in the app: When you kick off a recruiting run through the MCP or Rally Agent, review and approval now happen inside Rally instead of inline in Slack or chat. You'll get a link to check exactly who's getting invited and what they'll receive before a single invitation goes out. We did this for another layer of protection so that you can be confident nothing goes out without your explicit permission. 

• Auto-map screener and survey responses to person profiles: Screener and survey responses can now be automatically mapped to person properties via the MCP. The MCP uses AI to suggest the best property match per question and handles the mapping in one step. Answers get stored on each participant's profile, which means your panel data gets richer with every study that runs.

Coming soon

• Automated incentive approvals for surveys and unmoderated tests: same human-in-the-loop approval flow as interviews, coming shortly. For now, log into Rally Research to manually trigger incentives. 

• Survey and unmoderated test support in Rally Agent: currently MCP only; Agent parity is on the way

New to the Beta?

Rally Agent and MCP are live in Beta and free to test through mid-September. Opt in at the link below and we'll get you set up.

➡ Opt in here

Questions? Reach your CSM or drop us a note at support@rallyuxr.com.

Friday, August 14th: A Smoother Setup, Start to Finish

Two weeks of quality-of-life upgrades that take the friction out of getting a study off the ground, plus the ability to edit outreach emails right where you approve them.

Edit your outreach email before it sends

You can now edit email copy directly from the approval screen, no need to jump back to the chat to reword the invitation. Tweak the subject or body in the review step, then approve and send.

Available in: Rally MCP, Rally Agent, and Slack

Smoother setup during study creation for less back and forth

• Studies default to your team: if you have a default team set, the Agent will now automatically assign the study to that team.

• Preview a draft in Rally before you launch: get a working study link for an MCP-created draft so you can open it in Rally and review it before publishing.

• Assign a teammate as host: set someone other than yourself as the host for future interview bookings.

Available in: Rally MCP, Rally Agent, and Slack

Prompts to try:

• "Create an interview study for onboarding research."

• "Create a study that starts this Friday."

Improvements to people search and imports

• Smarter property matching: when you search for people, the Agent now favors better-populated, externally synced properties, so criteria like "uses Figma weekly" return the people you mean.

• Clearer file imports: importing a CSV now tells you exactly what's required and what happened, so uploads are easier to get right the first time.

• Import a full roster in one go: bring in a large participant list - like hundreds of people - in a single request, with clear guidance on where they'll land.

Available in: People search is Rally Agent, Slack, and Rally MCP; imports are Rally MCP

Prompts to try:

• "Find enterprise customers with an NPS score of 0-6"

• "Import these 300 participants into the Product Research panel."

Draft an interview brief with a guided playbook

The Rally MCP can now gather the right context and draft a full interview brief for you, following a built-in prep playbook - so you walk into every session ready.

Available in: Rally MCP, Rally Agent, and Slack

Fixes & improvements

• External-panel approvals show the cost breakdown. Approval links for external-panel recruiting now open the full cost sheet.

• Participant emails show up in interview search. When a booking record is missing an email, interview search now surfaces the participant's email from their profile.

• Screeners load faster and are repairable. Large screeners open more quickly, and screeners with broken skip logic can now be opened so you can fix them.

Questions? Reach your CSM or drop us a note at support@rallyuxr.com.

Friday, August 28th: Set Up and Manage Observer Rooms

You can now set up and manage observer rooms without leaving your workflow, plus a few fixes that make the Agent easier to talk to.

Set up and manage observer rooms

You can now manage observer rooms for your study sessions end-to-end. Turn on recording, add teammates as observers, and confirm the room is set for a live study - all directly through the Rally Agent or Rally MCP.

Available in: Rally MCP, Rally Agent, and Slack

Fixes & improvements

• Typos in study names still find the right study. If a study name is slightly off, the Agent now resolves it to the study you meant, or shows you close matches instead of insisting it doesn't exist.

• Editing survey-link email copy now works. Updating the wording around a survey link in an invitation email is no longer buggy.

Questions? Reach your CSM or drop us a note at support@rallyuxr.com.

Tuesday, September 15th: Rally Agent & MCP are now generally available 🎉

The Rally Agent and Rally MCP are out of beta and now officially generally available. Thank you to everyone who tested, broke things, and told us what they needed along the way; you shaped what shipped.

If you've been following along, you've watched this grow from 1:1 interviews at launch into an end-to-end research partner that spans every common study type, all built on the governance your research team already set. Here's everything that's live today, in one place:

Two ways in, the same research infrastructure underneath: the Rally Agent inside your workspace (and in Slack), and the Rally MCP inside the AI tools your team already uses, like Claude and Cursor. Everything below works across both unless otherwise noted.

Ask anything about your research

Get instant answers without clicking through the app.

• "Who's booked this week? Which interviews happened last week?"

• "Are we on track to hit our target? Who's consented, and how close are we?"

• "What did P3 say about pricing in their session?"

• "Find designers in SF who shop online weekly."

• "What needs my input across my studies?"

Pull interview and participant details, study progress, quota and consent status, screener and survey responses, session transcripts, people in your pool, and workspace teams — and the Agent scopes "my studies" to you.

Build and launch any study type

Interviews, surveys, and unmoderated tests are all supported end to end, from a conversation.

• Interviews: set up from a template or your panel, configure incentives and duration, and publish by invitation or public link.

• Surveys: create the study, author questions natively in Rally, or connect Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, Typeform, Google Forms, or a custom link; read responses as they arrive.

• Unmoderated Tests: point at Maze, UserTesting, UserZoom, Ballpark, and more, add your link and completion message, and launch. A safety check blocks go-live if anything critical is missing.

Along the way you can build screeners that mix qualifying and disqualifying rules, set quotas with participant targets and auto-close, auto-sort qualified respondents into quota groups from their answers, let qualified participants book immediately after screening, attach consent forms, edit a draft, and map screener or survey answers back to person properties.

Prompts to try:

• "Create a survey study about our new checkout flow with three questions, then publish it."

• "Set up an unmoderated usability test for the new checkout flow and invite our panel."

• "Cap this study at 10 managers and 10 individual contributors."

Run your interview schedule

Manage your whole schedule without opening Rally.

• Schedule, reschedule, and cancel interviews (with available times shown before anything moves).

• Change a host, add guests or observers, and mark attendance or no-shows.

• Set your own availability and out-of-office, and view a teammate's with the right permissions.

• Generate a full prep brief before a session, and manage observer rooms - recording, teammate observers, and live-study confirmation included.

Prompts to try:

• "Reschedule my interview with Priya to Thursday at 2pm ET - show me other times first."

• "Block my Fridays from the scheduler."

• "Prep me for my 3pm with Markus."

Manage participants and panels

• Add people to a draft or live study, or import a full roster in one request.

• Qualify or disqualify participants, move them between quota groups, and append notes.

• Create new populations and panels, look up custom person properties, and keep panel data richer with every study by mapping responses to profiles.

Prompts to try:

• "Import this CSV and start a study with these people."

• "Move these participants to the Managers quota group."

Recruit with confidence

• Check panel feasibility before you launch - and see whether you'll need to import more people.

• Review exactly who's getting invited and what they'll receive, with approval happening in the app before a single invitation goes out.

• Track email activity - sends, opens, and bounces - and confirm a specific participant received your email.

• Pause, resume, or close research and recruiting campaigns anytime.

• Recruit through external panels (User Interviews, Respondent) with feasibility checks, cost confirmation, and applicant review.

Prompts to try:

• "Can we target 20 senior engineers in fintech from our existing panel?"

• "How many invites went out? Any bounces?"

Handle messaging and incentives

• Send template or one-off custom emails to participants, and edit the copy right from the approval step.

• Approve incentive sends and resend or cancel individual incentives.

• Log custom incentives such as. swag, credits, and gift bags.

Prompts to try:

• "Approve incentive sends for yesterday's interviews."

• "Set up a $50 gift card as a custom incentive and log it as sent for Priya."

Grounded in governance

None of this bypasses your research team. Every action automatically follows the engagement rules, cooldown periods, consent requirements, contact limits, and approval workflows you've already established — so product teams move quickly while Research Ops stays in control.

Note: Read-only MCP access is now available in workspaces that don't have paid Agent access, so anyone can look up research data safely, while write actions stay gate- and permission-controlled.

What's Coming Next

We're not done. Here's what's actively in progress:

• Clips: create clips from interview recordings and find existing ones, right from the Agent or MCP.

• Study collaborators: add a teammate to a study you're running together.

And a bit further out: group interviews, deeper population management (merging duplicates, bulk property edits), creating and maintaining study templates, governance-settings management, and expanded incentive automation for studies built in Rally itself.

Questions, or want a hand getting your team set up? Reach your CSM or drop us a note at support@rallyuxr.com.

Monday, September 28th: Clips, smarter setup, and faster lookups

Our first post-GA update brings a way to clip and reuse interview moments, more guardrails while you build a study, new scheduling controls, and a set of new lookups across your workspace.

Clip and reuse interview moments

You can now create clips from interview recordings and easily find existing clips, so you can pull out the moment that matters and reuse it, right from the Agent or MCP.

Available in: Rally MCP, Rally Agent, and Slack

Prompts to try:

• "Clip the last five minutes of John Smith's session."

• "Find clips where participants talked about pricing."

More confidence while you build a study

• A study-readiness check: as you set up a study, the Agent now consistently flags what's still needed before you can successfully launch.

• Know how a template recruits: see whether a suggested study template pulls from your own panel or an external panel before you choose it.

• Smoother CSV imports: attach a CSV on its own and continue an import across follow-up messages.

• Manage study owners: Add or remove owners on a study without leaving your AI tool.

Available in: Rally Agent and Slack; study owners are Rally MCP

Look things up across your workspace

New lookups so you can find the right building blocks fast:

• Roles and permissions: review workspace roles and who's assigned to them.

• Templates: browse reusable question, consent, and email templates across the workspace, and see how each one is being used.

• Sign-up forms: find sign-up forms by team, status, owner, or destination population.

• Studies across teams: admins can search studies across every team they can access.

Available in: Rally MCP, Rally Agent, and Slack (cross-team study search is new to the Agent; already available via MCP)

Prompts to try:

• "What roles and permissions do we have in the workspace?"

• "Show me our reusable invitation email templates."

Interview logistics

• Send a scheduler invite from the Agent: Invite a participant to book a time, now directly via the Agent (already available via MCP).

• Remove a guest cleanly: take a guest off a scheduled interview without the risk of accidentally re-adding them.

• See your booking setup at a glance: after you configure a study, the Agent shows the active booking window and scheduling setup so you can confirm it's right.

• Let participants book multiple sessions. Turn on multi-session booking for studies that need more than one conversation per participant.

• Manage your team's availability. Set another interviewer's availability, plus daily or weekly interview limits, when you have permission.

Available in: Rally MCP, Rally Agent, and Slack (multi-session booking and team availability are Rally MCP)

Prompts to try:

• "Send [participant name]in my [study] a scheduler invite to book a time with me."

• "Remove Jamie from Friday's session."

• "What booking window is active for the Onboarding study?"

Questions? Reach your CSM or drop us a note at support@rallyuxr.com.