Moving beyond employee listening to create sustainable workplace change has long been HR's greatest challenge. Perceptyx's innovative solution to this problem — Activate — has now been recognized with a 2025 HR Tech Award for "Talent Management - Best Advance in Practical AI."
The HR Tech Awards recognize the top 1-2% of the world's 5,000 HR technology firms for creating solutions that help HR leaders drive concrete business outcomes. In addition to Activate's win, Perceptyx's People Insights Platform was named a finalist in the "Employee Experience - Best Comprehensive Solution" category, further demonstrating how our comprehensive approach is transforming employee experience management for global organizations.
HR leaders have long struggled with a critical gap in their employee listening programs: how to translate valuable insights into lasting organizational change. While most platforms excel at generating data and insights, they often leave the crucial "last mile" of activation to overloaded managers, resulting in limited follow-through and little impact.
Built on the foundation of behavioral science pioneer Humu — acquired by Perceptyx in 2023 — Activate brings AI-powered activation to every level of the organization. The solution creates lasting behavior change and better outcomes through a suite of intelligent, interconnected capabilities:
Activate transforms listening insights into targeted plans by identifying a manager's top focus areas and suggesting research-backed actions. This radically simplifies the process of turning feedback into strategic improvement initiatives.
Based on Nobel Prize-winning research, Activate delivers science-based, habit-forming suggestions to managers and employees in the flow of work. These nudges are seamlessly integrated into daily tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack, email, or appropriate channels for deskless workers, making them effortless to adopt.
Powered by advanced LLM technology and behavioral science, Activate's AI Coach delivers precise, contextualized guidance tied to each manager's unique team dynamics. This provides just-in-time coaching that adapts to evolving team needs.
Beyond individual interventions, Activate includes capabilities that allow HR and L&D leaders to scale their development efforts to deliver business outcomes:
The People Insights Platform enables organizations to listen to employees at scale, analyze complex data, and generate meaningful insights. Activate then extends this value by ensuring these insights translate into tangible, sustainable improvements across the organization. Organizations have long struggled with turning employee experience insights into measurable change and business impact. This burden typically falls on already overloaded managers who are expected to create action plans using outdated approaches — plans which are often quickly forgotten as other workplace pressures persist. Activate directly addresses this challenge by bridging the gap between listening and action through practical, precise, and transformative AI innovation that helps managers effortlessly and consistently adopt new behaviors.
This combination of comprehensive listening and AI-driven action is what sets Perceptyx apart in the HR technology landscape. Only Perceptyx delivers a complete solution that addresses the entire employee experience journey from feedback to measurable change.
Organizations using Perceptyx's solutions are achieving significant, measurable improvements in key areas of employee experience and organizational performance.
A major U.S. research company had been working to improve cross-team collaboration and employee career advancement for several years. Despite implementing traditional strategies — including aligning departmental goals, enhancing cross-team processes, providing leadership coaching, creating inter-departmental connection opportunities, and investing in collaboration technology—progress had been limited due to recent transformations, turnover, and rapid growth.
Looking for a more effective approach, the company implemented Activate to drive measurable behavior change through AI-powered nudges. The results were impressive: 72% of participants engaged consistently with nudges, well above Perceptyx's 66% average. After just four months, a pulse survey revealed a 5-point increase in the percentage of employees who felt cross-departmental collaboration was effective, while those not receiving nudges actually showed a decline. Similarly, there was a 4-point increase in positive sentiment around career growth opportunities. Beyond sentiment improvements, the organization recorded a significant reduction in lost productivity and performance due to the improvements in cross-team collaboration.
A large enterprise organization sought to improve leadership capabilities across its workforce after a survey assessing leadership competencies for over 800 managers identified three critical areas for improvement: developmental feedback, inclusivity, and recognition & appreciation. Historically, addressing such leadership gaps required resource-intensive approaches like dedicated working groups, LMS courses, and in-person training — efforts that typically saw low engagement (sometimes as little as 10% participation) and minimal behavioral change.
Instead of these traditional interventions, the company implemented Perceptyx's Intelligent Nudges. Following the initial feedback, managers received weekly nudges offering practical, behaviorally-informed guidance tailored to their specific roles and developmental needs. These small, achievable suggestions were delivered directly within managers' daily workflows, making them highly accessible and actionable.
The results speak for themselves. When a second feedback assessment was conducted six months later, managers who received nudges experienced double-digit score increases in two key behavioral areas and a 7-point improvement in the third. By comparison, managers not receiving nudges showed only modest 1-2 point improvements over the same period. Most impressively, managers who initially scored low on behaviors related to developmental feedback, inclusivity, and recognition almost entirely closed the gap with their high-performing peers in just six months. With average engagement rates consistently between 60-70%, the nudges achieved exceptional reach and adoption across all organizational levels, driving meaningful leadership improvements without the enormous costs and resources required by traditional methods.
Perceptyx's recognition in the 2025 HR Tech Awards validates our approach to employee experience transformation – one that combines advanced AI technology with deep behavioral science expertise to create workplaces where every employee can thrive.
To learn more about how Activate and the People Insights Platform can transform your organization's approach to employee experience, contact our team today. For ongoing actionable insights about employee experience transformation and the latest innovations in HR technology, subscribe to our blog.