Innovation With Intention

In 2025, Awardco reached an inflection point.

What began as a mission to modernize employee recognition has evolved into something bigger: a unified platform where recognition, engagement, and rewards work together to shape culture at scale. This year was not about chasing trends or shipping features for the sake of novelty. It was about strengthening the foundation that made Awardco successful in the first place, then intentionally expanding on top of it.

Across recognition, AI, engagement, marketplace innovation, and platform infrastructure, every investment shared a common goal: move the recognition category forward while building the world’s most powerful and flexible rewards ecosystem. Recognition remains the heart of Awardco. In 2025, it also became the launchpad for what comes next.

New Recognition Features: Strengthening the Core

Recognition has always been Awardco’s foundation, and in 2025 that foundation grew stronger, more flexible, and more enterprise-ready.

Throughout the year, the platform evolved to support a broader range of recognition programs without sacrificing simplicity. Teams invested heavily in expanding core program types, refining administrative controls, and improving visibility into recognition activity. These updates were not just incremental improvements. They reflected a deliberate shift toward a recognition experience that can scale across global organizations while still feeling personal and human.

Enterprise partnerships played a critical role in shaping this progress. Enhancements delivered to support large, complex customers strengthened the recognition platform for everyone, setting the bar high for configurability, reliability, and scale. From improved nomination workflows to continued evolution of earn-based recognition, Awardco doubled down on building a recognition system that adapts to how organizations actually operate.

The result is a recognition platform designed not just for today’s needs, but for the next phase of growth. Flexible enough to support diverse programs. Powerful enough to serve the largest enterprises. Simple enough to drive everyday participation.

AI Enhancements: Making Recognition and Engagement Smarter

In 2025, Awardco’s approach to AI was grounded in clarity, trust, and real customer value.

Rather than overwhelming leaders with more data, AI enhancements focused on helping organizations understand culture faster and more clearly. Recognition data became a source of insight, not just activity. AI-powered themes and summaries surfaced patterns in recognition behavior, helping leaders quickly see what values were being celebrated and where momentum was building.

Within engagement, sentiment analysis added another layer of understanding by revealing how employees feel, not just what they say. These capabilities are transforming recognition and survey responses into actionable signals, giving leaders a clearer picture of engagement drivers across their organization.

Behind the scenes, Awardco made significant investments in responsible AI foundations. Infrastructure improvements ensured compliance, data integrity, and long-term scalability, reinforcing that intelligence should never come at the expense of trust. Awardco believes AI – especially the way it’s deployed in our product that we’ve termed Awardco Intelligence – should not be a black box. It is a tool designed to illuminate culture and support better decisions.

Awardco Engage™: Recognition Expands Into Engagement

With a strong recognition foundation in place, 2025 marked a major step forward as Awardco expanded into engagement.

Awardco Engage was built to feel native, not bolted on. Surveys and insights live directly alongside recognition, creating a seamless experience where listening and appreciation reinforce one another. Employees can share feedback in the same place they are recognized, and leaders can connect engagement insights to real cultural behaviors.

Throughout the year, Awardco Engage moved steadily toward general availability, debuting publicly and generating strong customer excitement. Multichannel notifications, robust reporting, and early insight layers laid the groundwork for turning feedback into action. Opportunities and strengths reporting further extended this vision, helping leaders understand not only what is happening, but where to focus next.

Awardco Engage represents a critical evolution in Awardco’s platform strategy. Recognition sparks culture. Awardco Engage helps organizations understand it, nurture it, and improve it over time. Together, they form the front-of-house hub for employee engagement.

Marketplace Enhancements: Building the World’s Largest Rewards Marketplace

Recognition only resonates when rewards are meaningful. In 2025, Awardco continued investing in the marketplace to ensure choice, accessibility, and global reach at an unmatched scale.

Marketplace enhancements focused on making redemption easier and more intuitive. Simplified checkout flows removed friction. Improved discovery helped employees find rewards they truly value. International expansion extended meaningful reward options to employees around the world while reducing operational complexity for administrators.

At the same time, Awardco continued exploring new brand partnerships and marketplace experiences, reinforcing its position as the largest and most flexible rewards marketplace in the industry. These investments strengthened a key competitive advantage: the ability to deliver choice without compromise.

Infrastructure and Security: Scaling Without Compromise

Some of the most important work in 2025 happened quietly.

As Awardco scaled, so did its platform investments. Awardco 2.0 continued rolling out as a unified, modular experience designed for long-term flexibility. Navigation updates, mobile performance improvements, and architectural enhancements ensured the platform could support rapid innovation without sacrificing reliability.

The mobile app reached general availability, bringing recognition and engagement directly into employees’ daily lives. After launch, focus shifted to performance, stability, and security, setting the stage for sustained adoption.

Across the platform, teams invested in security, accessibility, and compliance. From global infrastructure readiness to industry standards alignment, these efforts ensured that Awardco’s growth remains responsible, resilient, and built for the long term.

From Recognition Platform to Engagement Hub

2025 was not about launching everything at once. It was about building the right foundation to move faster, smarter, and intentionally into the future.

Recognition remains the heart of Awardco. Around it, engagement, insights, community, and rewards are coming together to form a unified experience for employees and leaders alike. The result is a platform that does more than recognize moments. It helps organizations understand their culture and shape it over time.

As Awardco looks ahead, the direction is clear. The future of employee engagement starts with recognition. Awardco is building what comes next.

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