As AI continues to expand its reach into the enterprise, so does the desire to maximize its full potential. But the journey to realizing all of your AI aspirations can be a bumpy road with twists and turns if you don’t have an experienced consulting partner to help navigate. Technology maturity, opportunity cost, fast-changing regulations, delays, failed POCs, and more are roadblocks an experienced partner can help guide you through.
AI consultancies help enterprises:
- Accelerate impact and time-to-value with AI
- De-risk AI-driven business activities and offers
- Upskill the entire enterprise to be AI native
Forrester defines AI consultancies as:
“Service provider firms that bring a holistic approach across people, process, technology, and data science to help enterprises transform with AI-driven systems and experiences for competitive advantage.”
Forrester Now Tech: AI Consultancies, Q1 2021 Report
Identifying the right AI consultancy to partner with can help improve AI’s impact on your business and drive value by helping you see its potential and avoid pitfalls.
In the report, Forrester segmented vendors based on annual consulting revenue into three categories: large, midsize, and small. Each vendor was asked a number of detailed questions about their services, including geographic presence, industry expertise, and AI experience and expertise. Based on the responses, Forrester supplies information about these consulting partners to help you determine the best vendor for your AI needs based on breadth of services.
Perficient’s Primary Functionality Lies in System Integration Services
Forrester listed Perficient as a midsize provider ($25M to $1B in annual revenue) with a focus on systems integration. According to the report, “Systems integrators offer the core foundation to help clients move from machine learning models to product AI systems and experiences. They bring together their data and analytic resources to deliver business impact, typically for core business capabilities and customer engagement. Expertise in technology, architecture, and stitching together tiers of technology and services helps clients overcome platform complexity and deployment challenges.”
Perficient’s listing in this Now Tech includes our geographic presence (99% NA, 1% LATAM); industry focus areas (healthcare, financial services, and automotive); and sample customers (HealthPartners and M&T Bank).
Perficient’s Approach to AI as a Systems Integrator
We approach AI with a level of pragmatism and a “think big, start small, act fast” mindset. Many AI programs fail because they were not built for future scale or to address real-world challenges. We help our clients develop an AI roadmap that is grounded in smaller, more manageable capabilities and projects to allow them to gain traction and build organizational confidence to move toward bigger goals.
In order to do this, we “think big” by helping our clients identify use cases and brainstorm applications to their challenges. After, we decompose those uses cases into functional and technical capabilities. Decomposition allows us to illustrate how capabilities can be applied to multiple use cases and are reusable for long-term scaling that enables a continuous delivery model for long-term outcomes.
And then we “start small and act fast” by prioritizing use cases. Prioritization ensures that what we pursue drives value in a meaningful amount of time and allows us to create success criteria prior to execution. We know that choosing the right use case that is relatively small, but will also have a big impact establishes a proof of concept and paves the way for other successful projects down the road for our clients.
Learn More About Perficient
The digital world is constantly evolving, and you have an important choice to make when it comes to selecting your AI consulting partner. To find out more, the Forrester Now Tech: AI Consultancies, Q1 2021 report is available for purchase via Forrester, and you can also reach out to our AI experts.
