It is not often that I sit in the audience at a technology vendor event and feel genuinely moved by a customer story.
However, that’s what happened at Pegaworld, Pega’s annual customer event, in Las Vegas last month, when they shared a case study on the main stage about the work that they have done with NHS 24, Scotland’s National Digital Health Service.
Now, NHS 24 operates 24/7 from South Queensferry, just outside Edinburgh, and covers the whole of Scotland (population 5.6 million).
It handles over 1.6 million calls a year and is the service people in Scotland call if they need urgent medical care for non-life- or limb-threatening injuries. It also provides help to people who are in mental health distress or when their local doctor, pharmacy, or dentist is closed.
Watching how they have worked hard to transform what was an ageing, rigid legacy system into what is now an intuitive, clinically safe platform using Pega, AWS, and Coforge was genuinely heart-warming.
Their work has reduced average patient handling time by 10 minutes, freeing staff from wrestling with technical bottlenecks and workarounds, allowing them to focus entirely on ensuring patients receive the right care.
Pega’s Customer Engagement Expertise
As a native and resident of Scotland, I must admit the whole story left me a little dewy-eyed.
But it also made me reflect on my visits to Pegaworld over the years, and I realized that I first attended a Pegaworld event back in 2016… ten years ago!
Over the years, I’ve realized that Pega not only creates top-tier technology but also leads the market in how it approaches customer engagement and issue resolution.
Here are three examples to illustrate my observation:
1. Next Best Action
In 2016, they talked about determining the “next best action” for customers by using their Customer Decision Hub as a central organizational brain to facilitate that.
They were one of the first technology vendors to do so, and they are still talking about it, announcing at Pegaworld a new agentic user experience for their Customer Decision Hub (CDH), called Customer Engagement Studio at Pegaworld.
What this means is that while CDH determines what to recommend, to whom, and when, Customer Engagement Studio brings together Pega and third-party AI agents in a single agentic workspace, enabling marketers to move from marketing brief to live personalized actions in a matter of minutes, all while maintaining governance and control.
2. Responsible AI
In 2017, long before the current generative AI boom, Pega focused on the ethical implications of “opaque versus transparent” AI and the absolute necessity of auditable decision-making.
Again, they were one of the first technology vendors to do so, and they continue to talk about it today through their commitment to Responsible AI, an approach that builds trust and mitigates risk by ensuring that AI adoption is ethical, fair, and beneficial to both the organization and its customers.
This is achieved by embedding strict governance, human oversight, and auditable workflows into AI execution, thereby protecting enterprises, particularly those in regulated industries, from the dangers of uncontrolled AI while keeping mission-critical decisions firmly under their control.
3. Legacy Transformation
In 2019, at Pegaworld, Pega customers shared their digital transformation secrets, emphasizing the need to replace outdated legacy technology infrastructure and systems, highlighting a key but largely overlooked anchor holding back many of their transformation initiatives.
Once again, they were one of the first vendors to start talking openly about legacy transformation and legacy tech debt, and they are still talking about it today, announcing a major new partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Transform at Pegaworld, which will see Pega’s Blueprint AI application design agent embedded within AWS Transform, with the aim of helping organizations identify applications and extract business rules from their legacy COBOL systems, and then reimagine these for the digital era.
In practice, once AWS identifies workflow-heavy systems, it feeds those structured insights directly into Pega Blueprint AI, which uses this output to automatically generate future-proof, cloud-ready application designs within the AWS Transform interface, enabling companies to fundamentally reimagine their business processes rather than abandoning them or simply migrating old inefficiencies to the cloud.
This is a big deal, given that there are reportedly between 200 and 250 billion lines of COBOL code still in daily operation, and that about 70% of large global corporations still depend heavily on COBOL for their essential, mission-critical tasks.
According to Shelia Anderson, EVP and Chief Information and Digital Officer at Unum Group, the partnership has enabled them to analyze and document about 1.5 million lines of COBOL code, some of which was well over 20 years old.
Moreover, using Pega Blueprint, they have been able to reimagine decades of embedded business rules as modern workflows and applications that will support their long-term growth and flexibility, and get them into production in a timeframe that would traditionally have taken years.
What We Can Learn from Pega’s Approach
These themes are just a few examples of how Pega has repeatedly been ahead of the market with its technology and approach over the years.
What they demonstrate is that whether it is modernizing millions of lines of COBOL or ensuring a patient in Scotland receives the urgent medical help they need, Pega’s focus remains firmly on measurable human and business impact, rather than chasing the latest AI trends or trying to out-AI their neighbor, as many other vendors seem prone to.
Moreover, if you want an idea of where the market is heading, you could do a lot worse than paying attention to what Pega are talking about and doing, particularly when it comes to driving better customer and business outcomes.
