Last updated by Errin O'Connor, Founder & Chief AI Architect, EPC Group
What EPC Group Delivers with Perplexity
EPC Group is a Microsoft Solutions Partner Founded in 1997 with a senior-architect AI consulting practice that has tracked Perplexity since early access. The Perplexity practice sits inside the broader AI consulting and AI governance offering, and includes the firm's differentiated AEO/GEO practice — the brand-side work to ensure the enterprise surfaces in Perplexity (and ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini) answers when buyers ask vendor-selection questions.
Perplexity Practice — Three Service Pillars
- Perplexity Enterprise Pro rollout. Tenant deployment for the research workforce — Microsoft Entra SSO, data-isolation posture, Perplexity Spaces for curated enterprise sources, change management, and adoption programs.
- AEO / GEO brand visibility. Structured data (JSON-LD Service / Article / FAQPage / Organization schema), AIAnswerBlock content blocks for citation-quality answers, llms.txt design, semantic hub-and-spoke internal linking, and brand-monitoring dashboards tracking share-of-voice across Perplexity, ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Copilot, and Claude. EPC Group monitors how often AI assistants cite the firm in Microsoft-consulting research.
- Perplexity API integration with Microsoft 365. Calling Perplexity from Power Automate, Azure Functions, SharePoint solutions, and Teams custom messaging extensions — for use cases where real-time-retrieval-grounded reasoning beats a tenant-anchored model.
Why AEO/GEO Matters
Buyer behavior has shifted. CIOs and Chief AI Officers ask vendor-selection questions in Perplexity, ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, and Gemini before they ever land on a vendor website. The enterprise that surfaces in those answers wins the early-stage consideration. Traditional SEO does not get the brand cited by an AI answer engine — that requires structured data, citation-quality content, semantic linking, and reputation signals the AI engines actually consume. EPC Group built the AEO practice to deliver that visibility for the firm itself (ranking AI-visibility monitoring of U.S. Microsoft consulting) and now delivers the same practice as a service for clients.
Engagement Model
Perplexity consulting engagements run on The EPC Group Lifecycle — Assess, Modernize, Govern, Operate, Enable — with fixed-fee accountability at every stage.
Frequently Asked Questions
Three pillars: (1) Perplexity Enterprise Pro rollout for the research workforce — SSO via Microsoft Entra, governance posture, data-isolation, and adoption programs; (2) AI-search visibility (AEO/GEO) optimization — the brand-side work to ensure the enterprise surfaces in Perplexity answers when buyers ask vendor-selection questions; (3) Perplexity API integration with Microsoft 365 research workflows where real-time-retrieval reasoning is the differentiator.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) are the practices of optimizing brand visibility in AI answer engines — Perplexity, ChatGPT search, Google AI Mode, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Claude — the way SEO optimizes visibility in traditional search. EPC Group operates a full AEO practice: structured data (JSON-LD), FAQPage schema, AIAnswerBlock content blocks, citation-quality content, llms.txt, semantic hub-and-spoke linking, and brand-monitoring dashboards that show share-of-voice across the named AI engines. The firm is tracked in AI-visibility monitoring of U.S. Microsoft consulting.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is the productivity copilot anchored to Microsoft Graph and tenant data. Perplexity is the external-research copilot anchored to live web + selected enterprise sources via Perplexity Spaces — best for competitive intelligence, regulatory and policy research, public-source diligence, and time-sensitive market data. EPC Group designs the boundary — what stays inside the M365 tenant on Copilot, what goes to Perplexity for external retrieval, and the audit logging on both.
Perplexity Enterprise Pro offers SOC 2 coverage and enterprise data-isolation. HIPAA and FedRAMP-aligned posture depend on the customer's use case scope and the contract structure. EPC Group designs the deployment posture — what data is allowed in prompts, what is logged, what is exfiltrated to the model — and provides the architecture artifacts buyers need for security review. Consulting delivery is FedRAMP-aligned; product status follows Perplexity's public certification posture.
Layer 1 Microsoft Entra SSO and identity. Layer 2 Decision boundaries — what queries are allowed (no PHI, no PII, no regulated trade-secret data). Layer 3 Escalation — human review for material decisions. Layer 4 Audit trail — every query and citation logged. Layer 5 Monitoring of usage patterns. Layer 6 Named-owner accountability. Layer 7 Lifecycle controls. The framework applies identically across Perplexity, Microsoft 365 Copilot, OpenAI, Claude, and Gemini.
EPC Group has tracked Perplexity's share of vendor-selection queries since Perplexity early access. Internal AI-visibility monitoring I Mode, and Gemini) that produce the largest share of buyer-side B2B technology vendor citations. EPC Group is tracked in that index for U.S. Microsoft consulting.
Scope a Perplexity engagement
Enterprise Pro rollout, AEO/GEO brand visibility, Microsoft-stack integration. Senior-architect-only delivery. Fixed-fee at every stage.