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:
- Human with Assistant: AI acts as an assistant, helping employees work better and faster.
- Human-Agent Teams: AI agents join teams as digital colleagues, taking on specific tasks at human direction.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
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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.
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.
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