In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses often find themselves in a peculiar situation: they’re brimming with valuable data, specialized tools, and incredibly talented teams, yet connecting these pieces efficiently can feel like navigating a complex maze. Individual departments might develop ingenious solutions, but these often remain isolated, creating fragmented processes and slowing down the adoption of true innovation.

This isn’t just about finding information; it’s about action. Imagine trying to streamline a critical business process, only to realize the necessary data is scattered across multiple systems, or the expert who knows how to unlock its full potential are not available. This fragmentation isn’t just inefficient; it’s a productivity bottleneck that prevents organizations from truly leveraging the power of AI.

The Power of Protocol: Connecting AI to Your Business Needs

At Perficient, we’re building a future where AI isn’t just a collection of disparate tools, but a unified, intelligent ecosystem that seamlessly integrates with your existing operations. We’re doing this by embracing a powerful concept: standardized protocols for AI applications, particularly the MCP (Model Context Protocol).

Think of it like the USB-C port for AI. Just as USB-C provides a universal way to connect devices, we’re advocating for a standardized method that allows AI models to effortlessly “plug into” diverse data sources, specialized tools, and even other advanced AI capabilities. This eliminates the traditional hurdles of custom integrations and siloed solutions, opening up a world of possibilities.

This approach means that highly specialized AI solutions can be developed, managed, and then easily integrated into a broader intelligent framework. Imagine a sales enablement AI that can instantly tap into your extensive product documentation, personalized customer histories, and market insights to generate hyper-relevant proposals. Or consider a project management AI that guides your teams through best practices, automatically surfaces relevant resources, and even identifies the ideal subject matter expert for a tricky client challenge – all while adhering to your company’s unique workflows.

Intelligent Automation: From Data to Dynamic Action

What truly sets this approach apart is the capability for these integrated AI solutions to not just provide information, but to orchestrate and execute intelligent automation. This means your AI can go beyond answering questions; it can trigger sophisticated, multi-step processes. Need to perform deep market research that requires gathering data from various internal reports, external databases, and even analyzing competitive landscapes? A well-integrated AI can orchestrate that entire process, delivering a synthesized analysis or even taking proactive steps, like scheduling follow-up meetings based on its findings.

This is where AI transitions from a helpful assistant to a true force multiplier for your business. It allows you to automate complex workflows, streamline decision-making, and unlock new levels of efficiency.

Driving Unified Innovation for Your Business

At Perficient, our internal Generative AI system, Scarlett, is a testament to this vision. Scarlett acts as a unified front-end, demonstrating how a standardized approach to AI can centralize efforts, streamline access to specialized intelligence, and accelerate solution adoption across diverse teams. This internal capability reflects the same principles we apply to help our clients achieve:

• Atomization of Effort: Break down large, complex problems into manageable, AI-powered components that can be rapidly developed and deployed.
• Centralized Access & Governance: Provide a single, intuitive interface for all your AI-driven capabilities, ensuring consistency, security, and scalability.
• Accelerated Progress & Adoption: When AI is easy to access and seamlessly integrated, your teams can adopt new solutions faster, democratize specialized knowledge, and drive innovation across the entire organization.

Ultimately, this unified approach to AI is about empowering your business to operate smarter, faster, and more cohesively. It’s about transforming how you deliver value to your customers and achieve your strategic objectives in an increasingly AI-driven world.

In Adobe’s 2025 AI and Digital Trends report, one message rings loud and clear: the convergence of marketing and IT is essential to digital success. As AI becomes increasingly embedded in customer experience strategies, marketing and IT leaders must collaborate closely to unlock its full potential.

The Rise of Agentic AI

One of the most transformative ideas in the report is the rise of agentic AI, autonomous systems that collaborate across platforms to deliver hyper-personalized, real-time experiences. For marketing and IT leaders, this represents a major shift. These aren’t just tools, but strategic partners capable of transforming how content is created, optimized, and delivered at scale.

This shift is already being realized in the field, as industry leaders begin to harness the power of Agentic AI to streamline operations and enhance customer outcomes. For example, Perficient’s Adobe services delivery team is leveraging the technology to make AEM as a Cloud Service migrations faster.

“The emergence of Agentic AI is revolutionizing our service delivery, delivering significant time and effort savings for our customers. Take the move to AEM Cloud, for instance. We’re leveraging agents to handle tasks like code remediation and complex mapping for advanced content migrations into AEM,” says Robert Sumner, principal in Perficient’s Adobe practice.

As organizations explore these capabilities, the collaboration between marketing and IT becomes even more critical. IT leaders must ensure the infrastructure is in place to support real-time data flow and AI orchestration, while marketers must rethink workflows to fully leverage AI’s creative and analytical potential.

Nearly two-thirds (65%) of senior executives identify leveraging AI and predictive analytics as primary contributors to growth in 2025. (Adobe 2025 Digital Trends report)

Seamless, Personalized Experiences

The report also highlights a growing emphasis on predictive analytics. Businesses are moving beyond reactive strategies to proactively anticipate customer needs. This shift is enabling more meaningful, real-time interactions across the customer journey.

For marketing leaders, this means moving beyond historical performance metrics to real-time, forward-looking insights. For IT, it means ensuring the data infrastructure is robust, integrated, and accessible across teams. However, many organizations still struggle with siloed systems and fragmented data, which hinder their ability to deliver seamless experiences.

Ross Monaghan, principal in Perficient’s Adobe practice, underscores this point by highlighting how leading organizations are turning data into action through AI-powered strategies.

“We don’t have a shortage of data. The challenge lies in consuming it, unifying it, and activating it in real time to deliver personalized, one-to-one experiences that meet the demands of consumers. Organizations that are winning are already leveraging predictive bidding, dynamic budget allocation, and channel mix modelling to optimize media buying. They’re also developing AI-driven audience clusters based on behavior, intent, or psychographics to improve targeting precision. By training models on past customer behavior, they can predict which leads are most likely to convert. The possibilities are endless if you embrace the power of what AI can bring to the table. AI isn’t here to replace us, it’s here to eliminate the thousands of hours spent on manual tasks, chasing insights that may or may not exist in fragmented data,” says Monaghan.

Efficient, accurate, and personalized experiences all start with secure and reliable data. Learn More

Breaking Down Silos to Boost Adoption

The customer journey is increasingly owned by a mix of marketers, technologists, and CX specialists. And while this diversity brings valuable perspectives, it can also lead to friction and inefficiencies. Marketing needs IT to deliver scalable, secure, and flexible platforms. IT needs marketing to define the customer vision and drive innovation. The report suggests that aligning these teams around shared goals and metrics is essential for success and the ability to deliver seamless, personalized experiences.

Monaghan says, “Organizations must continue to view everything through the lens of the customer. That means breaking down internal silos, politics, and bureaucracy. Customers don’t care who owns the data or whether it sits with IT or marketing. What matters is that we come together to identify key audiences, mapping core personas and journeys, and developing dynamic use cases that guide each user through a personalized experience. We then can analyze the effectiveness of content, offers, and sentiment to drive customer lifetime value at scale.”

Ensuring Responsible AI Deployment

The report also addresses the ethical dimensions of AI. Issues like data privacy, algorithmic bias, and transparency are top of mind for both marketing and IT leaders. Building trust with customers requires more than compliance. It demands intentional governance. IT leaders must implement frameworks for responsible AI use, while marketers must ensure that personalization efforts respect user boundaries and values.

The Time to Act is Now

Adobe’s 2025 report is both a roadmap and a call to action for marketing and IT leaders. The future belongs to organizations that can harness AI not just as a tool, but as a strategic enabler, bridging creativity and technology to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

In a time of constantly evolving customer expectations, Perficient has established itself as a leader in delivering high-impact customer service solutions to the world’s leading brands. This dedication was recognized by the Business Intelligence Group’s 2025 Excellence in Customer Service Awards, where Perficient proudly claimed the title of Organization of the Year in the Internet and Technology category. 

A Commitment to Transforming Customer Experiences 

Perficient has been consistently collecting awards across categories, from industry awards like the eHealthcare Leadership Awards to partner awards like our Coveo Relevance: Accelerator Award. This year, Perficient is excited to be once again recognized, this time for the collaborative work around customer service and contact center we do with the world’s largest enterprises and favorite brands. By specializing in modernized customer service with AI-driven strategies, cloud solutions, and data insights, our experts bring innovation and impact from strategy to execution and beyond.  

When it comes to contact center and customer service solutions, our expertise spans omnichannel support, including phone, email, social media, chatbots, and messaging apps. We don’t just stop at providing tools—our experts craft tailored, proactive customer experiences that align with individual preferences. From reducing call volumes through AI-powered virtual assistants to streamlining operations, Perficient drives efficiency while elevating satisfaction. 

What truly differentiates Perficient is its people and partnerships. With thousands of skilled professionals worldwide and partnerships with leading technology companies like AWS, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Adobe, Perficient excels in implementing effective, enterprise solutions. Our industry-first approach ensures a deep understanding of our clients’ needs and customized strategies that drive real results. customized strategies that drive real results. 

Adopting AI to Overcome Contact Center Challenges  

In the last 12 months, Perficient has tackled industry challenges head-on. As businesses faced growing demands for seamless customer service amid logistical and operational hurdles, we’ve introduced innovative solutions to help clients overcome obstacles. These included AI-powered tools, site reliability engineering for eCommerce platforms, and enhanced customer outreach strategies to prevent lost sales due to out-of-stock scenarios. 

Additionally, Perficient guided enterprises through the complexities of adopting AI, helping brands scale solutions efficiently with streamlined deployment processes. 

Delivering Impactful Results 

The results we’ve been able to deliver for our partners speak for themselves. From deploying an AI chatbot for a global automaker, which increased site engagement by 76%, to handling 75% of patient calls for a nationwide urgent care provider, we’ve redefined what excellence in customer service looks like. 

Our work contributions and expert interviews have also garnered analyst recognition. Gartner and Forrester recently highlighted Perficient for its expertise in scalable AI deployment and its innovative use of GenAI in customer interactions. 

Driving the Future of Customer Service 

Winning the 2025 Excellence in Customer Service Award as Organization of the Year is a testament to Perficient’s transformative impact on how enterprises connect with customers. With a relentless focus on innovation, partnerships, and tailored solutions, we’ll continue to lead the way in reshaping customer service for the better. 

Perficient’s ethos inspires a future where businesses not only meet but exceed the expectations of their customers, one scalable, data-driven solution at a time.

Explore our contact center expertise and learn about other recent awards won.  

The 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report, titled “The Year the Frontier Firm Is Born,” explores the transformative impact of AI on business and knowledge work. This comprehensive report delves into how AI is reshaping organizations, creating new roles, and redefining workflows. “Frontier Firms” are redefining how we perceive teamwork by synergizing human judgment and AI agents.

Understanding Frontier Firms

The term “Frontier Firm” refers to companies that are seamlessly integrating AI into their workforce, revolutionizing traditional operations. According to the Work Trend Index, these firms are twice as likely to be thriving as their counterparts. This success is reflected in the optimistic outlook of their employees—93% of workers in these firms feel positive about the future, compared to 77% in other companies.

Becoming a Frontier Firm

The journey to becoming a Frontier Firm involves three different levels of maturity:

1. Human with Assistant: AI acts as an assistant, helping employees work better and faster.
2. Human-Agent Teams: AI agents join teams as digital colleagues, taking on specific tasks at human direction.
3. Human-Led, Agent-Operated: Humans set direction for agents that run entire business processes and workflows.

New Terms for a New World of Work

The report introduces several terms:

• Agent: An AI-powered system that can autonomously complete tasks or workflows with human oversight.
• Agent Boss: A human manager of one or more agents.
• Capacity Gap: The deficit between business demands and the maximum capacity of humans alone to meet them.
• Digital Labor: AI or agents that can be purchased on demand to scale workforce capacity.
• Human-Agent Ratio: A business metric optimizing the balance of human oversight with agent efficiency.

Human-Agent Teams

Human-agent teams are upending traditional organizational structures. The report highlights the importance of getting the human-agent ratio right to ensure optimal performance. Leaders must balance the number of agents per person to avoid underutilization or overwhelming human capacity.

Employee Mindset

The report stresses the need for employees to adopt a thought partner mindset when working with AI. This involves treating AI as a teammate capable of initiating action, managing projects, and adapting in real time.

Rise of the Agent Boss

As AI agents join the workforce, the role of the agent boss emerges. Leaders expect their teams to redesign business processes with AI, build multi-agent systems, train agents, and manage them within five years.

Starting the Journey

The journey towards becoming a Frontier Firm doesn’t require perfection from the outset. The organizations that are thriving today are those that are not only adopting AI but are also intelligently restructuring their workflows around these technologies.

To fully leverage AI’s potential, organizations must play both offense and defense. AI can boost employee productivity and drive cost efficiencies, but it should also be used to grow revenue and cut costs. Here are some considerations as we move forward:

1. Begin with Your Most Significant Pain Point: Determine one or two key processes that, if optimized for speed, cost, or efficiency, would significantly enhance your business operations. This method enables prioritization of AI initiatives that yield the highest impact.
2. Play Offense and Defense: A winning AI strategy requires leveraging AI to grow revenue and cut costs. Organizations that apply AI to enhance their key differentiators will gain a competitive advantage
3. Integrate AI with Your Company Data: For Agents to be effective, they must use your company’s data and knowledge.  It is necessary to have suitable tools like Microsoft Purview to address oversharing concerns, protect against data loss and insider risks, and govern agent activity to enforce regulations and policies.
4. Consider a Growing Number of Agents: AI transformation is accelerating! In the last year many organizations have been focused on giving employees access to an LLM in a way that satisfies security and compliance requirements. As we progress, we will need to consider how we can secure, govern and support a growing number of agents. We should consider how solutions such as the Copilot Control System can support these efforts.

The 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report underscores the pivotal role of AI in transforming business and knowledge work. Organizations should consider AI’s potential, redefine workflows, and prepare for a future where human-agent teams drive innovation and growth.

What will your first digital employee do?

You can download a copy of the 2025 Work Trend Index report here.

From Exploration to Integration

When the co-founder and “Senior Maverick” at Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly, speaks, you listen.

In our latest episode of What If? So What? Jim Hertzfeld sits down with Kevin Kelly, the Co-Founder of Wired magazine and one of the most respected observers of the digital age. Their conversation spans AI, organizational change, emotional technology, and the importance of staying endlessly curious.

It’s not about where the frontier is—it’s about how we navigate toward it.

“We discover things by using them.”

Kelly is quick to push back against the idea that insight can come from speculation alone.

“I think there’s a lot of Thinkism… the fallacy that you can figure things out by thinking about them,” he explains. “I think we discover things by using them.”

That simple shift—from theorizing to experimenting—is at the heart of innovation. He encourages direct interaction with new tools as the only real way to grasp their potential. “If I can’t use it, I want to talk to someone else who’s actually using them in some way. Because that’s where we’re going to learn.”

Innovation moves fast. Adoption moves differently.

While headlines often suggest exponential speed, Kelly brings the conversation back to reality.

“The frontier is moving very, very, very fast,” he says. “But the adoption is just going to take a long time… You can’t just introduce this technology nakedly. You have to adjust workflow, organizational shape… you have to adjust the infrastructure to maximize it.”

It’s not resistance. It’s pacing. And it’s a pattern we’ve seen before—he compares it to the slow but transformational adoption of electricity, which reshaped industries not just functionally but structurally. That same shift is playing out now with AI.

From digital to cloud to AI

Kelly observes that many companies aiming to embrace AI first seek to digitize, but that step alone may not be enough.

“There’s a step after digitization… which is they have to become a cloud company,” he says. “That’s really the only way that the AI is going to work at a large scale in a company like that.”

It’s not a warning. It’s a reflection—on what’s required to unlock the full potential of these tools.

When AI becomes emotional

There’s one dimension of AI that Kelly believes most people haven’t fully anticipated: the emotional bond.

“People will work with [AI] every day and become very close to them in an emotional way that we are not prepared for,” he explains. “It’s like… those who don’t have their glasses, and they need them to function. So, it’s not like falling in love with their glasses—it’s like, no, you are at your best with this thing.”

In that sense, AI won’t just reshape productivity. It may reshape the way we relate to technology altogether.

What does “digital” even mean anymore?

When asked to define “digital,” Kelly pauses. “At least in my circle, I don’t hear that term being used very much more,” he says.

But if pressed? He points to pace as the key distinction: not just whether something is digital or analog, but how fast it’s moving, how quickly it evolves.

That framing helps explain why some technologies feel modern and others feel legacy—it’s not just the format. It’s the momentum.

“You’re going to be a newbie for the rest of your life.”

Kelly closes the conversation with one piece of advice that applies to everyone, at every stage:

“No matter what age you are, you’re gonna spend the rest of your life learning new things,” he says. “So, what you want to do is get really good at learning… because you’re gonna be a newbie for the rest of your life.”

It reminds us that in a world of constant transformation, our greatest advantage isn’t what we know—it’s how we grow.

Listen to the full conversation

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Meet our Guest – Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly is Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His newest book is Excellent Advice for Living, a book of 450 modern proverbs for good living. He is co-chair of The Long Now Foundation, a membership organization that champions long-term thinking and acting as a good ancestor to future generations. And he is founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a subscriber-supported journal of unorthodox conceptual news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985. Other books by Kelly include 1) The Inevitable, a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller, 2) Out of Control, his 1994 classic book on decentralized emergent systems, 3) The Silver Cord, a graphic novel about robots and angels, 4) What Technology Wants, a robust theory of technology, and 5) Vanishing Asia, his 50-year project to photograph the disappearing cultures of Asia.  He is best known for his radical optimism about the future.

Learn More about Kevin Kelly

Meet our Host

Jim Hertzfeld is Area Vice President, Strategy for Perficient.

For over two decades, he has worked with clients to convert market insights into real-world digital products and customer experiences that actually grow their business. More than just a strategist, Jim is a pragmatic rebel known for challenging the conventional and turning grand visions into actionable steps. His candid demeanor, sprinkled with a dose of cynical optimism, shapes a narrative that challenges and inspires listeners.

Connect with Jim:

LinkedIn | Perficient