SSE Adding perks to NPCs

[miguick]

From what I've gathered, the AddPerk command and perk-adding magic effects only work on the player, they cannot add a perk to an actor during runtime.

 

This is probably old news, but I'm wondering if anyone knows whether it's possible to give perks NPCs during the course of the game, at all? Even if it's through SKSE or some other utility I don't know of? Apparently even the vanilla game has plenty of scripts that intend to give perks to actors other than the player, presumably with no effect.

 

If hand-editing an actor's perk list is indeed the only way to give them particular perks, is there some way to automate the process for several NPCs at once? Maybe some SSEEdit script, or is there some other utility that can do that?