Business Challenge: Scaling to $5 Billion without Scaling Friction
Eliminating Fragmented Journeys, Email Chains and Manual Handoffs at Scale
Persistent’s internal IT and business teams sit at the center of an ambitious growth journey. The company needed a modern operating system that could support growth, improve employee experience and keep costs in check.
Core processes, such as order-to-cash, hire-to-retire, procure-to-pay and contract lifecycle management (CLM), ran across systems such as Salesforce, Oracle Fusion and specialist CLM platforms. Individually, these tools worked well; together, the handoffs broke down. Opportunity data from Salesforce did not flow cleanly into CLM, leading to delays, duplication and long email chains.
Employees felt this fragmentation daily. A simple policy query, leave balance check or contract clarification often meant navigating multiple portals or waiting for a helpdesk response, depending on time zone and capacity. Productivity dipped and employee experience suffered, which could prove risky for a high-growth company competing for top talent.
As the organization prepared to double and triple in size, these manual interventions and visibility gaps became scaling risks. Contract cycles slowed revenue recognition, operational costs climbed and leaders lacked real-time data for confident decisions. Off-the-shelf platforms like Workday, DarwinBox, ServiceNow or vendor-native AI (Salesforce Einstein, Oracle Redwood) could optimize slices of the puzzle, but not the enterprise end-to-end.
Persistent needed a unified, AI-driven orchestration layer across systems, journeys and employees.
Solution: The AssIstX Framework
To address this, Persistent created the AssIstX Framework—a modular, AI-powered ecosystem designed to simplify processes, drive efficiency and augment human intelligence. Every intervention started with a clear question: Will this reduce friction, speed up a journey, cut costs or improve decisions?
Teams began with a business-first journey mapping across:
- Order-to-Cash: From Salesforce lead generation through CLM-based contracting to delivery handoffs
- Hire-to-Retire: Recruitment, onboarding, career progression and HR operations
- Procure-to-Pay: Vendor onboarding, contracting, approvals and payments
At each step, they identified bottlenecks, manual effort and experience gaps. GenAI was applied selectively, only where it could demonstrably unlock scale, reduce cost or improve decision-making.
From this work emerged a modular Assist model: a federated ecosystem of domain-specific AI agents (“AssIsts”) that can run independently or be orchestrated together, each built with a plug-and-play design to make them reusable across domains while preserving contextual intelligence.
Key Assists include:
- PiAssIst: Centralized assistant for policy queries, leave balances and career guidance
- ContractAssIst: Streamlines opportunity-to-contract workflows and builds a searchable contract knowledge base
- ResumeAssIst and InterviewAssIst: Simplify and standardize talent acquisition
- ITAssIst: Provides day-to-day IT support without relying on time-zone–bound help desks
Under the hood, the framework combines Microsoft Copilot, Power Platform and Teams AI Library with LLMs from Azure OpenAI, Amazon Q and Google Gemini, all grounded in Persistent’s enterprise data and rules, with guardrails for security, governance and compliance. Each Assist is tuned to Persistent’s processes, not a generic chatbot. Tools like GitHub Copilot accelerate coding, testing and deployment, supporting a build-small, release-fast, measure-and-scale rhythm.
How It Works: One Fabric, Many Assists
The Assist Framework operates as a fabric of AI-driven agents woven into everyday workflows. Employees mostly interact with a single front door—PiAssIst—while multiple domain Assists collaborate in the background.
- PiAssIst is the “Mother” Assist:
- Single entry point for HR and policy questions across leave, timesheets, holidays, insurance and benefits
- Responds to most queries in under four seconds
- Routes more complex questions on careers, skills or learning to CareerAssIst or LearningAssIst
- ContractAssIst connects Salesforce and CLM:
- Pulls opportunity data directly from Salesforce into CLM
- Creates draft contracts and surfaces key intelligence (pricing, risk clauses, delivery implications) for legal, sales and delivery
- Moves collaboration from long email trails into Microsoft Teams, creating a searchable, auditable negotiation history
- ResumeAssIst and InterviewAssIst support hiring at scale:
- ResumeAssIst scans large resume volumes against job descriptions and shortlists candidates
- InterviewAssIst recommends interview panels, manages scheduling and generates structured feedback templates
- Together, they reduce recruiter effort and improve consistency and fairness in hiring
- ITAssIst provides always-on IT support:
- Handles routine tasks such as software installs, email alias setup, Active Directory management and access queries
- Operates 24×7 in Teams, reducing reliance on time-bound help desks
- Consolidates multiple IT tools and knowledge sources into a single conversational interface
Career and Learning Assists help employees discover relevant skills, certifications and learning paths aligned to Persistent’s strategic priorities. All Assists are delivered inside Microsoft Teams and Outlook, with Copilot providing conversational access to enterprise data, so employees don’t have to learn new systems; the Assist fabric comes to where they already work.
Business Impact: Speed, Savings and Smarter Decisions
Unified Assists Turning Everyday Workflows into Measurable Outcomes
The Assist Framework was built with clear KPIs from day one and is now a cornerstone of Persistent’s growth strategy.
ContractAssIst: Revenue enablement and risk intelligence
- 90% reduction in email communication, as negotiations shift to a centralized Teams hub
- 70% faster contract cycle times, with average closure dropping from ~20 days to under six days, directly accelerating revenue realization
- A searchable knowledge base of interactions, helping teams revisit past negotiations, identify risks and refine strategies
PiAssIst: Employee experience at scale
- 100,000+ employee queries resolved across policy, leave, timesheets and career topics
- Average response time of less than four seconds
- 24×7 availability, independent of time zones or helpdesk hours
- Reduced load on HR teams and higher trust in enterprise systems
Domain-specific Assists: Productivity across functions
- Resume and Interview Assists reduce recruiter effort through automated shortlisting, panel recommendations, scheduling and standardized evaluations.
- ITAssIst has:
- Saved over 114,000 productive hours per quarter, unlocking 634 extra productive days
- Delivered 97% faster resolution of IT issues
- Resolved over 90% of tickets instantly via the bot, while consolidating IT tools into one interface in Teams
- Career and Learning Assists help employees build personalized skill roadmaps aligned to business needs.
These improvements also enhance scalability, ensuring that Persistent can sustain its growth trajectory toward $5 billion without proportionally increasing operational costs.
From Internal Engine to Market Differentiator
The Assist Framework is now a source of external differentiation. ContractAssIst has been highlighted by Satya Nadella as one of the earliest declarative Copilot use cases and Assist has won multiple awards, including a CII award for digital innovation. It is showcased to global customers as a market-ready solution.
Initiatives like Gig Garage extend this model further: as a low-code/pro-code platform, it allows employees to co-create new Assists, enabling domain experts—not just engineers—to design and launch agentic solutions. This democratizes AI innovation and embeds it into Persistent’s culture.
Assist has effectively become Persistent’s AI operating system, powering growth, enabling employees and creating IP that can be taken to market. What began as an internal transformation engine now defines how Persistent delivers AI-powered enterprises for clients worldwide.
Make Assist your blueprint for an AI operating system that unifies journeys, data, and decisions across the enterprise. Talk with Persistent.
