Published in The Grit Daily March 24, 2026
The 2026 HDI Awards ‘Best Use of AI’ Finalists: How Allstate, SupportLogic, and WBM Technologies Are Rewriting the Rules of Customer Support
For more than three decades, the Help Desk Institute (HDI) has served as the definitive voice of the enterprise service desk industry. Its annual Global Service and Support Awards are widely considered the Oscars of the customer experience world, recognizing the individuals, teams, and organizations that have achieved the highest standards of excellence in technical support. But this year, as the organization announced its 2026 finalists, one category has captured the attention of the entire enterprise software ecosystem: Best Use of AI.
The three finalists competing for the crown — Allstate, SupportLogic, and WBM Technologies LP — represent a fascinating cross-section of the modern enterprise. One is a legacy insurance giant undergoing a radical digital transformation. Another is a 75-year-old managed IT services pioneer. And the third is an AI-native platform that is actively dismantling the traditional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) architecture.
Together, they illustrate exactly how artificial intelligence has moved past the hype cycle of chatbots and into the core operational infrastructure of global business. Ahead of the live winner announcement at HDI Service & Support World in Las Vegas this May, here is a deep dive into the three finalists redefining the future of service, and why the stakes for customer experience have never been higher.
The Trillion-Dollar Stakes of Customer Experience
To understand why the “Best Use of AI” category is so fiercely contested this year, one must look at the macroeconomic forces driving enterprise behavior in 2026. Customer experience (CX) is no longer viewed as a soft metric or a cost center; it is the primary battleground for revenue retention.
According to recent data compiled by ClearlyRated, the financial impact of poor customer service is staggering. A 2025 PwC survey found that 52 percent of consumers stopped buying from a brand entirely after a single bad experience. Furthermore, roughly 70 percent of customers will abandon a brand after just two negative interactions. The hidden danger for enterprises is “silent churn” — only one in 26 unhappy customers ever actually complains. The rest simply leave, taking their lifetime value with them.
Conversely, the upside of getting CX right is massive. Customers who rate their experience with a perfect score spend 140 percent more and remain loyal up to six times longer. Forrester research indicates that brands aligning customer experience with brand experience can unlock up to 3.5 times more revenue growth.
To capture this growth and prevent catastrophic churn, enterprises are pouring unprecedented capital into artificial intelligence. According to a January 2026 forecast by Gartner, worldwide spending on AI is projected to reach a staggering $2.52 trillion this year, representing a 44 percent year-over-year increase. As John-David Lovelock, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, noted, organizations are now “prioritizing proven outcomes over speculative potential.”
This is exactly what the HDI Awards are measuring: proven outcomes. The three finalists have demonstrated that AI can move the needle on the metrics that matter most.
Allstate: The Enterprise Giant’s “Transformative Growth”
When a 95-year-old insurance behemoth makes the shortlist for a global AI award, it signals a seismic shift in enterprise adoption. Allstate’s inclusion as a finalist is the direct result of a multi-year strategy dubbed “Transformative Growth,” driven from the very top by CEO Tom Wilson. The goal was not simply to modernize, but to fundamentally alter the cost structure and service delivery model of the insurance giant.
Allstate hasn’t just experimented with AI; they have deployed it at a staggering scale. The company recently rolled out a conversational AI system that now handles more than 400,000 customer conversations every single month. By intelligently routing and resolving these inquiries, the system has achieved an impressive 38 to 40 percent containment rate, freeing up human agents to handle the most complex, high-empathy situations.
But the transformation goes much deeper than routing calls. In a striking admission earlier this year, Allstate revealed that almost all of the communications its representatives send out to claimants are now written by generative AI. Even more surprising? The company’s CIO publicly noted that these AI-generated emails are actually achieving higher customer satisfaction scores than those written entirely by human managers.
By deploying agentic AI systems that can reason, resolve complex claims issues, and communicate with empathy, Allstate has proven that legacy enterprises can successfully reinvent themselves as AI-first organizations. The financial results speak for themselves: in Q3 2025, Allstate reported net income of $3.7 billion, up massively from $1.2 billion a year earlier. (Notably, Allstate Technology Support is also a finalist for the Best Service and Support Organization award, proving that their internal IT operations are just as advanced as their customer-facing tools).
WBM Technologies LP: The Managed Services Innovator
Based in Western Canada, WBM Technologies LP brings a 75-year heritage to the cutting edge of modern IT. With operations spanning Vancouver, Calgary, Regina, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, and the United States, WBM has built a reputation as a powerhouse in outcome-driven managed IT solutions. They employ over 500 IT professionals and serve some of the most progressive organizations across North America.
WBM is no stranger to the HDI stage. In 2024, the company took home the prestigious global award for Best Service and Support Organization. This year, they are back as finalists in three separate categories: Best Change Initiative, Best Service and Support Organization, and Best Use of AI.
Their nomination in the AI category is anchored by their patent-pending Enterprise Experience Platform. Rather than treating AI as a standalone tool or a bolted-on chatbot, WBM has integrated artificial intelligence into a seamless, data-driven service model. This platform spans their core practice areas, including Modern Workplace Enablement, End User Computing, and their 24x7x365 Enterprise Service Desk.
By combining SOC 2-compliant operations with predictive, self-healing support technologies, WBM has demonstrated how managed service providers can leverage AI to deliver transformative business results for their client communities. They are not just fixing IT tickets; they are using AI to predict and resolve issues before the end-user even realizes there is a problem. This proactive approach is exactly why they were also recently named to CRN’s 2026 Elite 150 Managed Service Provider list.
SupportLogic: The AI-Native Platform Dismantling the CRM
While Allstate and WBM represent the enterprise and service provider perspectives, SupportLogic represents the technological vanguard. Founded by former VMware executive Krishna Raja, SupportLogic is not just improving the support experience; it is fundamentally challenging the architecture it runs on.
For decades, the support industry has relied on ticketing systems and CRMs — passive, relational databases that require human agents to manually enter metadata, tag cases, and fill out forms. SupportLogic’s thesis is that this “system of record” model is dead. Instead, they have built a “system of intelligence” — a CRM-less architecture powered by ambient AI agents that run in the background 24/7.
The Four-Engine Architecture
SupportLogic’s platform is built on a sophisticated four-engine architecture designed specifically for the complex language of B2B support:
1. Data Extraction Engine: It consolidates unstructured data across existing systems of record (such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and ServiceNow) and normalizes it into a universal format. Crucially, it does this without requiring a “rip and replace” of existing tools, allowing enterprises to deploy in under 60 days.
2. Signal Extraction Engine: Instead of relying on flawed post-interaction surveys, this engine uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to read 100 percent of tickets, voice transcripts, and Slack threads. It extracts over 140 nuanced customer sentiment “signals” from noisy, jargon-filled interactions.
3. Context Engine: It automatically maintains contextual memory across different interactions, channels, and contact boundaries, ensuring nothing is lost when a case moves between agents or departments.
4. Orchestration Engine: It uses custom alerts, coaching rubrics, and routing rules to trigger immediate action based on the AI’s findings.
From Reactive to Predictive
The results of this architecture are striking. Because the AI is constantly monitoring sentiment and behavioral cues, it can predict escalations and churn risks long before a customer ever complains.
The platform’s impact is validated by a roster of enterprise heavyweights. NICE achieved a 35 percent reduction in escalation rates and a 4x reduction in monthly case volume using SupportLogic’s Resolve SX capabilities. Certinia saw a 30 percent reduction in escalations and a 28 percent decrease in time-to-resolution. Nutanix reduced escalations by 40 percent while maintaining a 90 NPS score. Across its customer base, SupportLogic reports an average 80 percent reduction in escalation requests and a 53 percent reduction in mean time to resolution.
Furthermore, SupportLogic has partnered with Snowflake to build the SupportLogic Data Cloud. This allows enterprises to migrate their support data into a secure data lake, where they can use Snowflake Intelligence to query their data in natural language (e.g., “Show me all high-churn-risk accounts that have seen a 20% spike in frustration signals this week”).
As Rajesh Ramesh, a Support Manager at UiPath, noted: “SupportLogic has given us that edge with accurate predictions that allows us to transform from a reactive to a proactive model of support.”
Perhaps the most compelling proof point, however, is that SupportLogic is its own best customer. The company runs its entire internal support operation on its own platform — “eating their own dog food” — to manage customer interactions, predict escalations, and route cases. By using their own ambient AI agents to support their enterprise clients, SupportLogic serves as a live, operational role model for the exact CRM-less architecture they are selling to the market.
The Verdict Awaits in Vegas
The HDI Awards will culminate in May, but the broader narrative is already clear. With $2.5 trillion flowing into AI this year, and trillions more at stake in customer retention, the era of reactive customer support is officially over.
Whether it is an insurance giant automating claims with unprecedented empathy, an IT provider building self-healing service desks, or a software platform replacing the traditional CRM with ambient intelligence, the future belongs to those who can anticipate customer needs. Allstate, WBM Technologies, and SupportLogic have proven that the best use of AI isn’t just about answering questions faster. It is about understanding the customer so deeply that the question never needs to be asked in the first place.
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