In financial services, trust has always been foundational. But today, it’s being redefined, not by brand reputation or policy language, but by how customers experience speed, control, and transparency in real time.
According to Adobe’s report, “State of Customer Experience in Financial Services in an AI-Driven World,” 96% of financial services executives say customers value privacy and data protection, and 63% say they expect transparent pricing. These have become operational expectations, and they’re shaping how trust is built moment by moment.
A face-ID login. A real-time transaction alert. A personalized financial nudge. These micro-moments now carry more weight than any static privacy policy. Customers judge trustworthiness by how responsive and secure their digital experiences feel—especially when managing sensitive tasks like wire transfers, credit approvals, or investment decisions.
In this new landscape, trust is engineered, not assumed.
Customers today expect more than digital convenience. They want to feel in control of their money, identity, and digital footprint and engage with institutions that respect their time, values, and privacy. Trust is no longer built solely through face-to-face interactions or legacy brand reputation. Trust is earned through every digital touchpoint.
To meet these expectations, financial institutions must deliver on three critical fronts:
Customers expect secure access anytime, anywhere. A mobile-first design can enable frictionless, secure interactions that reinforce a sense of control and safety. Biometric authentication, real-time alerts, and intuitive navigation all contribute to a trustworthy experience.
Trust grows when customers feel understood. Using AI and data responsibly to deliver tailored insights, whether it’s budgeting tips, investment opportunities, or credit alerts, shows that the institution is aligned with the customer’s financial well-being. Transparency in how data is used is key to maintaining that trust.
Whether a customer is engaging via app, website, call center, or in-branch, the experience should feel unified and secure. Consistency in branding, messaging, and service quality reinforces reliability, while secure data handling across channels ensures peace of mind.
Institutions that fail to deliver these experiences risk losing not just attention but loyalty. In a competitive landscape where switching providers is easier than ever, trust becomes a differentiator and a strategic imperative.

Trust has become a core design principle. Instead of treating it as the outcome of compliance, financial institutions are embedding it into the very fabric of the customer experience. This shift reflects a broader understanding: trust is emotional, experiential, and earned in moments, not just mandated in policies.
That means:
Trustworthy experiences require collaboration across silos. When product managers, cybersecurity experts, and UX designers work together, they can create solutions that are not only secure but also intuitive and empathetic. This alignment ensures that security features enhance, not hinder, the user experience.
Customers want tailored experiences, but also want to know their data is safe. Leading institutions are adopting privacy-by-design principles, making it easy for users to understand how their data is used and giving them control over personalization settings. Transparency builds confidence; ambiguity erodes it.
From clear language in disclosures to consistent UI patterns, every detail matters. Predictable flows, upfront information, and visible security cues (like encryption badges or session timers) help users feel safe and informed. These micro-moments of clarity add up to a macro-impact on trust.
This evolution requires cross-functional collaboration and a deep understanding of customer expectations.
Download the full Adobe report to explore the top 10 insights shaping the future of financial services, and discover how your organization can lead with intelligence, responsibility, and trust.
Perficient and Adobe bring together deep industry expertise and powerful experience technologies to help financial services organizations unify data, orchestrate journeys, and deliver customer-centric experiences that build trust and drive growth.
In today’s digital-first business landscape, streamlining document workflows is essential for operational efficiency and compliance. DocuSign, a global leader in electronic signatures, offers secure and legally binding digital signing capabilities. When integrated with Appian, a powerful low-code automation platform, organizations can automate approval processes, reduce manual effort, and enhance document governance.
This guide walks you through the process of integrating DocuSign as a Connected System within Appian, enabling seamless eSignature workflows across your enterprise applications.
DocuSign empowers organizations to manage agreements digitally with features that ensure security, compliance, and scalability.
Appian’s native support for DocuSign as a Connected System simplifies integration, allowing developers to:
Before starting, ensure you have:
https://<your-appian-environment>/suite/rest/authentication/callback




Legal Document Processing
Automate the signing of SLAs, MOUs, and compliance forms using DocuSign within Appian workflows. Ensure secure access, maintain version control, and simplify recurring agreements with reusable templates.
Finance Approvals
Digitize approvals for budgets, expenses, and disclosures. Route documents to multiple signers with conditional logic and securely store signed records for audit readiness.
Healthcare Consent Forms
Send consent forms electronically before appointments. Automatically link signed forms to patient records while ensuring HIPAA-compliant data handling.
Integrating DocuSign with Appian enables organizations to digitize and automate document workflows with minimal development effort. This powerful combination enhances compliance, accelerates approvals, and improves user experience across business processes.
For further details, refer to:
]]>At Dreamforce 2025, Salesforce introduced a new era of AI-powered work. The Agentic Enterprise is more than a concept; it’s a framework for how businesses operate. AI is becoming a trusted teammate, handling repetitive tasks so people can focus on creativity, relationships, and impact.
Agentforce 360
Agentforce 360 connects Salesforce apps like Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce, Slack, and Tableau through a shared agentic layer. This means every experience is powered by consistent reasoning and unified data. Over 1.8 million conversations have already taken place, and more than 12,000 customers are using Agentforce to automate and scale their operations.
Data 360
Previously known as Data Cloud, Data 360 is the foundation for agentic intelligence. It transforms structured and unstructured data into usable context, enabling agents to understand and act with precision. With Intelligent Context and Tableau Semantics, AI can speak the language of your business.
Not sure if your data is ready for this level of intelligence? Start with our PrecisionIQ Assessment to uncover gaps, organize fragmented data, and build a roadmap for clean, connected, and actionable insights.
Slack
Slack is now the workspace where humans and agents collaborate. A redesigned Slackbot acts as a personal assistant, summarizing threads, drafting responses, and surfacing Salesforce insights. Thanks to the new Model Context Protocol, Slack connects with external AI tools like OpenAI and Anthropic, making it a true agentic operating system.
Agentforce Voice
Voice is becoming a natural interface for AI. Agentforce Voice allows real-time conversations with customers, pulling in Salesforce data and acting based on intent. It works with platforms like Amazon Connect, Five9, NiCE, and Vonage, making it easy to integrate into existing workflows.
Agentforce Builder
Agentforce Builder lets teams create agents using natural language. You can describe what you want, and the system generates logic, flows, and data connections. It supports multiple views, including doc-style, low-code, and script formats, making collaboration across roles easier.
Agentforce Vibes
For developers, Agentforce Vibes is a contextual coding assistant that turns natural language into working code. It understands your org’s metadata and builds solutions that follow best practices and reuse existing components.
TL:DR
Perficient is uniquely positioned to help you take advantage of this shift through our expanded partnership with Salesforce and the recent acquisition of Kelley Austin, strengthening our ability to deliver AI-first solutions at scale.
Want to see how this vision becomes reality for your business?
Explore our Agentic Enterprise resource center to keep learning. You’ll find practical use cases, proven frameworks, and solutions like Data 360 in a Box and Agentforce in a Box that turn AI strategy into measurable outcomes. Discover how Perficient and Salesforce partner to help organizations accelerate value, scale confidently, and lead in the era of agentic AI.
]]>As organizations continue their journey toward composable and headless architectures, the way we manage even simple things like redirects evolves too. Redirects are essential for SEO and user experience, but managing them within a CMS often introduces unnecessary complexity. In this blog, I will share how we streamlined redirect management for a Sitecore XM Cloud + Next.js implementation using Vercel Edge Config – a modern, edge-based approach that improves performance, scalability, and ease of maintenance.
Traditionally, redirects were managed within Sitecore through redirect items stored in the Content Tree. While functional, this approach introduced challenges such as scattered items, and added routing overhead. With Sitecore XM Cloud and Next.js, we now have the opportunity to offload this logic to the frontend layer – closer to where routing happens. By using Vercel Edge Config, redirects are processed at the edge, improving site performance and allowing instant updates without redeployments.
By leveraging Vercel Edge Config and Next.js Middleware, redirects are evaluated before the request reaches the application’s routing or backend systems. This approach ensures:
In the new setup:
Redirect rules are stored in Vercel Edge Config, a globally distributed key-value store that allows real-time configuration access at the edge. In Vercel, each project can be linked to one or more Edge Config stores.
You can create edge config stores at project level as well as at account level. In this document, we will be creating the store at account level and this edge config store will be shared across all the projects within the account.
Steps:

{
"redirects": {
"/old-page": {
"destination": "/new-page",
"permanent": true
},
"/old-page/item-1": {
"destination": "/new-page./item-1",
"permanent": false
}
}
}
To connect your store to a project, navigate to Projects tab and click on Connect Project button.
Select the project from the dropdown and click Connect.

Vercel automatically generates a unique Edge Config Connection String for your project which is stored as an environment variable in your project. This connection string securely links your Next.js app to the Edge Config store. You can choose to edit the environment variable name and token name from the Advanced Options while connecting a project.
Please note that EDGE_CONFIG environment that is added by default (if you do not update the name of the env. variable as mentioned in step #7). This environment variable is automatically available inside the Edge Runtime and used by the Edge Config SDK.
npm install @vercel/edge-config
The SDK provides low-latency, read-only access to configuration data replicated across Vercel’s global edge network. Import the SDK and use it within your middleware to fetch redirect data efficiently.
middleware.ts file located at the root of the Next.js application. This setup ensures that every incoming request is intercepted, evaluated against the defined redirect rules, and redirected if necessary – before the request proceeds through the rest of the lifecycle.Code when using single store and the default env. variable EDGE_CONFIG
import { NextResponse } from 'next/server';
import type { NextFetchEvent, NextRequest } from 'next/server';
import { get } from '@vercel/edge-config';
export async function middleware(req: NextRequest, ev: NextFetchEvent) {
try {
const pathname = req.nextUrl.pathname;
// Normalize the pathname to ensure consistent matching
const normalizedPathname = pathname.replace(/\/$/, '').toLowerCase();
// Fetch redirects from Vercel Edge Config using the EDGE_CONFIG connection
const redirects = await get('redirects');
const redirectEntries = typeof redirects === 'string' ? JSON.parse(redirects) : redirects;
// Match redirect rule
const redirect = redirectEntries[normalizedPathname];
if (redirect) {
const statusCode = redirect.permanent ? 308 : 307;
let destinationUrl = redirect.destination;
//avoid cyclic redirects
if (normalizedPathname !== destinationUrl) {
// Handle relative URLs
if (!/^https?:\/\//.test(redirect.destination)) {
const baseUrl = `${req.nextUrl.protocol}//${req.nextUrl.host}`;
destinationUrl = new URL(redirect.destination, baseUrl).toString();
}
return NextResponse.redirect(destinationUrl, statusCode);
}
}
return middleware(req, ev);
} catch (error) {
console.error('Error in middleware:', error);
return middleware(req, ev);
}
}
export const config = {
/*
* Match all paths except for:
* 1. /api routes
* 2. /_next (Next.js internals)
* 3. /sitecore/api (Sitecore API routes)
* 4. /- (Sitecore media)
* 5. /healthz (Health check)
* 6. all root files inside /public
*/
matcher: ['/', '/((?!api/|_next/|healthz|sitecore/api/|-/|favicon.ico|sc_logo.svg|throw/).*)'],
};
Code when using multiple stores and custom environment variables. In this example, there are two Edge Config stores, each linked to its own environment variable: EDGE_CONFIG_CONSTANT_REDIRECTS and EDGE_CONFIG_AUTHORABLE_REDIRECTS. The code first checks for a redirect in the first store, and if not found, it checks the second. An Edge Config Client is required to retrieve values from each store.
import { NextRequest, NextFetchEvent } from 'next/server';
import { NextResponse } from 'next/server';
import middleware from 'lib/middleware';
import { createClient } from '@vercel/edge-config';
export default async function (req: NextRequest, ev: NextFetchEvent) {
try {
const pathname = req.nextUrl.pathname;
// Normalize the pathname to ensure consistent matching
const normalizedPathname = pathname.replace(/\/$/, '').toLowerCase();
// Fetch Redirects from Store1
const store1RedirectsClient = createClient(process.env.EDGE_CONFIG_CONSTANT_REDIRECTS);
const store1Redirects = await store1RedirectsClient .get('redirects');
//Fetch Redirects from Store2
const store2RedirectsClient = createClient(process.env.EDGE_CONFIG_AUTHORABLE_REDIRECTS);
const store2Redirects = await store2RedirectsClient.get('redirects');
let redirect;
if (store1Redirects) {
const redirectEntries =
typeof store1Redirects === 'string'
? JSON.parse(store1Redirects)
: store1Redirects;
redirect = redirectEntries[normalizedPathname];
}
// If redirect is not present in permanent redirects, lookup in the authorable redirects store.
if (!redirect) {
if (store2Redirects) {
const store2RedirectEntries =
typeof store2Redirects === 'string'
? JSON.parse(store2Redirects)
: store2Redirects;
redirect = store2RedirectEntries[normalizedPathname];
}
}
if (redirect) {
const statusCode = redirect.permanent ? 308 : 307;
let destinationUrl = redirect.destination;
if (normalizedPathname !== destinationUrl) {
// Handle relative URLs
if (!/^https?:\/\//.test(redirect.destination)) {
const baseUrl = `${req.nextUrl.protocol}//${req.nextUrl.host}`;
destinationUrl = new URL(redirect.destination, baseUrl).toString();
}
return NextResponse.redirect(destinationUrl, statusCode);
}
}
return middleware(req, ev);
} catch (error) {
console.error('Error in middleware:', error);
return middleware(req, ev);
}
}
export const config = {
/*
* Match all paths except for:
* 1. /api routes
* 2. /_next (Next.js internals)
* 3. /sitecore/api (Sitecore API routes)
* 4. /- (Sitecore media)
* 5. /healthz (Health check)
* 6. all root files inside /public
*/
matcher: [
'/',
'/((?!api/|_next/|healthz|sitecore/api/|-/|favicon.ico|sc_logo.svg|throw/).*)',
],
};
With this setup:
Managing redirects at the edge has made our Sitecore XM Cloud implementations cleaner, faster, and easier to maintain. By shifting this responsibility to Next.js Middleware and Vercel Edge Config, we have created a more composable and future-ready approach that aligns perfectly with modern digital architectures.
At Perficient, we continue to adopt and share solutions that simplify development while improving site performance and scalability. If you are working on XM Cloud or planning a headless migration, this edge-based redirect approach is a great way to start modernizing your stack.
]]>Our organization has joined the Salesforce Data 360 Partner Advisory Board, a strategic forum that brings together top partners to influence the future of Salesforce’s data solutions. This collaboration ensures that innovations in Data 360 deliver measurable business outcomes for enterprises.
Why This Matters for Businesses
Announced during Dreamforce, Data 360 is the next evolution of Salesforce Data Cloud. It transforms fragmented enterprise data into a single, actionable view without requiring data movement. This capability powers real-time workflows, better decision-making, and more intelligent automation.
For business leaders, this means:
What’s New with Data 360
Data 360 introduces advanced features designed to maximize ROI:
These innovations allow organizations to activate trusted data everywhere, powering smarter decisions and connected customer experiences across sales, service, marketing, and beyond.
Meet Our Advisory Board Representatives
We are proud to have Anu Pandey, Technical Director of AI & Data Cloud at Kelley Austin, and Chuck Tomanek, Salesforce Delivery Leader, representing our team on the Data 360 Partner Advisory Board.
Anu brings deep expertise in multi-cloud architecture and enterprise vision, while Chuck focuses on AI-first solutions that turn complexity into clarity. Their combined experience ensures client priorities remain central to Salesforce’s roadmap. Together, they will help shape innovations that deliver measurable ROI through data-driven strategies.
We are also excited to strengthen this work with the capabilities of Kelley Austin, recently acquired by our organization, expanding our leadership in AI and Data 360 solutions.
Why This Matters to You
Data 360 is a foundation for smarter business. By unifying fragmented data without costly duplication, Data 360 enables real-time workflows, predictive insights, and personalized experiences at scale.
For organizations, this means:
Build Your Agentic Enterprise With Salesforce
AI is everywhere, but most businesses are not prepared to use it. Teams launch pilots that never scale, data remains fragmented, and legacy systems stall progress before it starts.
We take a different approach. Our expanded partnership with Salesforce accelerates business value through small, iterative use cases that deliver measurable outcomes. With solutions like Data 360 in a Box and Agentforce in a Box, we help organizations modernize CRM, unify data, and embed AI into everyday workflows.
If you are ready to move beyond proof of concept and into production, explore our workshops and solutions designed to activate AI securely and confidently. Learn more about building your Agentic Enterprise.
]]>In previous blog, the strategic and architectural considerations that set the foundation for a successful Sitecore migration is explored. Once the groundwork is ready, it’s time to move from planning to execution, where the real complexity begins. The development phase of a Sitecore migration demands precision, speed, and scalability. From choosing the right development environment and branching strategy to optimizing templates, caching, and performance, every decision directly impacts the stability and maintainability of your new platform.
This blog dives into the practical side of migration, covering setup best practices, developer tooling (IDE and CI/CD), coding standards, content model alignment, and performance tuning techniques to help ensure that your transition to Sitecore’s modern architecture is both seamless and future-ready.Title (suggested): Executing a Successful Sitecore Migration: Development, Performance, and Beyond
1. Component and Code Standards Over Blind Reuse
Best practice: Treat the migration as an opportunity to raise your standards. Audit old components for patterns and ideas, but don’t copy-paste them. Rebuild them using modern frameworks, Sitecore best practices, security guidelines, and accessibility compliance. This ensures the new solution is future-proof and aligned with the latest Sitecore roadmap.
2. Template Creation and Best Practices
3. Development Practices and Tools
A clean, standards-driven development process ensures the migration is efficient, maintainable, and future-proof. It’s not just about using the right IDEs but also about building code that is consistent, compliant, and friendly for content authors.
Build with the content author in mind:
Strong development practices not only speed up migration but also set the stage for easier maintenance, happier authors, and a longer-lasting Sitecore solution.
4. Data Migration & Validation
Migrating data is not just about “moving items.” It’s about translating old content into a new structure that aligns with modern Sitecore best practices.
5. SEO Data Handling
SEO is one of the most critical success factors in any migration — if it’s missed, rankings and traffic can drop overnight.
Strong SEO handling ensures the new Sitecore build doesn’t just look modern — it retains rankings, grows traffic, and is ready for AI-powered search.
6. Serialization & Item Deployment
Serialization is at the heart of a smooth migration and ongoing Sitecore development. Without the right approach, environments drift, unexpected items get deployed, or critical templates are missed.
Best Practices
Properly managed serialization ensures clean deployments, consistent environments, and fewer surprises during migration and beyond.
7. Forms & Submissions
In Sitecore XM Cloud, forms require careful planning to ensure smooth data capture and migration.
Best Practices: Track submissions in analytics, test end-to-end, and make forms configurable for content authors.This approach ensures new forms work seamlessly while historical data is preserved.
8. Personalization & Experimentation
Migrating personalization and experimentation requires careful planning to preserve engagement and insights.
Best Practices:
A structured approach to personalization ensures targeted experiences, actionable insights, and a smooth transition to the new Sitecore environment.
9. Accessibility
Ensuring accessibility is essential for compliance, usability, and SEO.
10. Performance, Caching & Lazy Loading
Optimizing performance is critical during a migration to ensure fast page loads, better user experience, and improved SEO.
Proper caching and lazy loading ensure a fast, responsive, and scalable Sitecore experience, preserving SEO and user satisfaction after migration.
11. CI/CD, Monitoring & Automated Testing
A well-defined deployment and monitoring strategy ensures reliability, faster releases, and smooth migrations.
Best Practices:
A robust CI/CD, monitoring, and automated testing strategy ensures reliable deployments, reduced downtime, and faster feedback cycles across all environments.
12. Governance, Licensing & Cutover
A successful migration is not just technical — it requires planning, training, and governance to ensure smooth adoption and compliance.
Proper governance, training, and cutover planning ensures the new Sitecore environment is compliant, adopted by users, and fully operational from day one.
13. Training & Documentation
Proper training ensures smooth adoption and reduces post-migration support issues.
Summary:
Sitecore migrations are complex, and success often depends on the small decisions made throughout development, performance tuning, SEO handling, and governance. This blog brings together practical approaches and lessons learned from real-world implementations — aiming to help teams build scalable, accessible, and future-ready Sitecore solutions.
While every project is different, the hope is that these shared practices offer a useful starting point for others navigating similar journeys. The Sitecore ecosystem continues to evolve, and so do the ways we build within it.
]]>
We’re excited to announce that Perficient has been named a 2025 Salesforce Partner Innovation Award winner in Financial Services! This recognition highlights our commitment to helping financial institutions modernize with AI, data, and Salesforce-powered experiences.
“The Salesforce 2025 Partner Innovation Awards celebrate the achievements of partners who are redefining industries and delivering exceptional customer experiences with Salesforce.” – Jim Steele, President, Global Strategic Customers and Partners, Salesforce
Why This Award Matters
The Salesforce Partner Innovation Awards celebrate partners who deliver exceptional customer experiences and redefine industries through innovation. As technologies like AI evolve rapidly, partners play a critical role in helping businesses unlock their full potential.
Our Winning Story: Perficient + Nationwide
Nationwide wanted to unify siloed customer data without relying on complex, costly integration methods. Using Salesforce Data 360, Perficient helped Nationwide activate advanced segmentation capabilities at scale.
Solution Highlights:
Key Benefits:
Marketing, sales, and service teams can now build and activate granular, cross-channel segments that enable more agile, targeted, and proactive customer engagement.
What’s Next?
We’re proud to partner with Salesforce to help financial institutions embrace AI-driven innovation. Ready to learn more? Visit our new Build Your Agentic Enterprise With Salesforce Resource Center to explore how Perficient can help you unlock the power of data and AI.
]]>As the year wraps up, so does an incredible run of conferences spotlighting the best in Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and Copilot innovation. We’re thrilled to share that Amarender Peddamalku, Microsoft MVP and Practice Lead for Microsoft Modern Work at Perficient, will be speaking at the Microsoft 365, Power Platform & Copilot Conference in Dallas, November 3–7.
Amarender has been a featured speaker at every TechCon365, DataCon, and PWRCon event this year—and Dallas marks the final stop on this year’s tour. If you’ve missed him before, now’s your chance to catch his insights live!
With over 15 years of experience in Microsoft technologies and a deep focus on Power Platform, SharePoint, and employee experience, Amarender brings practical, hands-on expertise to every session. Here’s where you can find him in Dallas:
Whether you’re just getting started with Power Platform or looking to scale your automation strategy, Amarender’s sessions will leave you inspired and equipped to take action.
]]>Datadog Synthetic Monitoring provides automated, simulated user journeys to proactively confirm the health and performance of websites and APIs, helping detect issues before users experience them. Integrating this into our Azure DevOps pipeline ensures that only builds where core site functionality is verified get promoted, reducing the risk of regressions in production. This approach is especially valuable in Sitecore projects, where critical web journeys and API endpoints are essential to user experience.

The Azure DevOps YAML pipeline is set up to invoke Datadog CI, run all tests matching our tag criteria, and fail the pipeline if any test fails.
Build artifacts include full logs for further review.

Only successful resolution and green reruns allow code promotion.

By integrating Datadog Synthetic Monitoring directly into our CI/CD pipeline with Azure DevOps. Sitecore teams gain a safety net that blocks faulty builds before they hit production, while keeping a detailed audit trail. Combined with careful test design, secure key management, and continuous expansion of coverage, this approach becomes a cornerstone of proactive web application quality assurance.
]]>
Microsoft Ignite 2025 is right around the corner—and Perficient is showing up with purpose and a plan to help you unlock real results with AI.
As a proud member of Microsoft’s Inner Circle for AI Business Solutions, we’re at the forefront of helping organizations accelerate their AI transformation. Whether you’re exploring custom copilots, modernizing your data estate, or building secure, responsible AI solutions, our team is ready to meet you where you are—and help you get where you want to go.
Here’s where you can connect with us during Ignite:
Join Us for Happy Hour
Unwind and connect with peers, Microsoft leaders, and the Perficient team at our exclusive happy hour just steps from the Moscone Center.
Fogo de Chão |
November 17 |
6:00–9:00 PM
RSVP Now
Book a Strategy Session
Need a quiet space to talk AI strategy? We’ve secured a private meeting space across from the venue—perfect for 1:1 conversations about your AI roadmap.
Ember Lounge — 201 3rd St, 8th floor, Suite 8016 |
November 18-20
Reserve Your Time
From copilots to cloud modernization, we’re helping clients across industries turn AI potential into measurable impact. Let’s connect at Ignite and explore what’s possible.
In today’s financial landscape, personalization is no longer a luxury; it’s a customer expectation. Yet, according to Adobe’s latest State of Customer Experience in Financial Services in an AI-Driven World report, only 36% of the customer journey is currently personalized, despite 74% of financial services executives acknowledging that their customers expect tailored interactions.
This gap isn’t just a missed opportunity; it’s a trust breaker.
Financial decisions are deeply personal. Whether a customer is exploring mortgage options, planning for retirement, or managing small business finances, they expect advice and experiences that reflect their unique goals and life stage. Generic nudges and one-size-fits-all messaging simply don’t cut it anymore.
Early-stage interactions—like product discovery or financial education—are especially critical. These are high-value moments where relevance builds trust and guides decision-making. Yet many institutions fall short, lacking the orchestration needed to deliver personalized engagement across these initial touchpoints.
The report highlights several barriers:
These challenges are compounded by the rise of AI-powered experiences, which demand real-time, context-aware personalization across channels.

To close the gap, financial institutions must evolve from episodic personalization to adaptive, full-lifecycle engagement. That means:
Download the full Adobe report to explore the top 10 insights shaping the future of financial services, and discover how your organization can lead with intelligence, responsibility, and trust.
Are you looking for a partner to help you transform and modernize your technology strategy? Perficient and Adobe bring together deep industry expertise and powerful experience technologies to help financial services organizations unify data, orchestrate journeys, and deliver customer-centric experiences that build trust and drive growth.
Search is no longer just about blue links and ten results per page. With the rapid adoption of Generative AI, consumers are increasingly turning to AI-written summaries to get quick, contextual answers without ever clicking through to a website. According to Bain & Company, 80% of consumers now rely on AI-generated summaries for at least 40% of their searches. This shift is fundamentally changing how people discover and interact with brands online.
However, the implications extend beyond search behavior alone. AI is now shaping the very pathways through which digital traffic flows, often bypassing traditional entry points, such as homepages and product pages. Instead, consumers engage with AI-generated content that summarizes, interprets, and even recommends on behalf of brands.
U.S. retail sites saw a 4,700% year-over-year increase in traffic from Generative AI sources in July 2025. Source: Adobe Analytics
This new behavior has given rise to what’s known as the “zero-click search” phenomenon, where users get the information they need directly from search results or an AI interface, without visiting the source site. For brands, this presents a major challenge: how do you measure engagement when the click never happens?
Traditional metrics like pageviews and bounce rates are losing relevance. Gartner projects a 50% decline in organic traffic by 2028, driven largely by the rise of AI-powered search and zero-click experiences. As a result, marketers are grappling with a visibility paradox: their content may be powering AI summaries and influencing decisions, but without direct engagement, it’s harder to attribute value or optimize the experience.
This leads to a critical concern…what happens when AI misrepresents your brand?
As large language models (LLMs) become the default interface for search and content discovery, brands are increasingly at the mercy of how these models interpret and summarize their content. And the truth is, LLMs don’t always get it right.
AI-generated summaries often strip away nuance, flatten brand voice, and even misrepresent key messages. This is especially risky for brands in regulated industries or those with complex value propositions. When your content is reduced to a few lines in a zero-click search result, you lose control over how your brand is perceived and whether your audience even visits your site.
These risks raise urgent questions for marketers:
To answer these questions, marketers need a new kind of toolkit that’s designed specifically for the AI era.
To help brands adapt to this new reality, Adobe has introduced the LLM Optimizer. This innovative solution is designed to ensure that brand content is not only discoverable by LLMs but also accurately represented in AI-generated summaries.
The LLM Optimizer works by analyzing how LLMs interpret and surface brand content, then providing actionable insights to improve visibility and accuracy. It helps marketers:
In a world where AI is the new interface, Adobe’s LLM Optimizer empowers brands to take back control of their digital presence, even when the consumer never clicks.
As AI continues to reshape how consumers search, discover, and decide, brands must evolve their digital strategies. It’s no longer enough to optimize for search engines alone; now, you must optimize for the AI models that interpret your content and deliver it to your audience.
Adobe’s LLM Optimizer offers a powerful way forward that helps brands stay visible, relevant, and measurable in a zero-click world. The digital front door may have moved, but with the right tools, brands can still welcome customers in.
Navigating the AI-driven digital landscape not only requires the right tools, but it also demands the right partner. Perficient and Adobe combine deep implementation and industry expertise with cutting-edge experience technology to help brands stay visible, relevant, and in control.
Let us help you rethink your digital front door and build experiences that connect, whether your customer clicks or not.
]]>