On any given day, an organization’s employees might be using smartphones, laptops, desktop computers, tablets, a variety of cloud and networking services, a host of enterprise applications and mobile apps, and other digital tools. Many of them might be working remotely, and nearly all of them will be operating with tight security and data privacy constraints.

From the users’ standpoint, what could possibly go wrong? A lot, in fact. Today’s digital workforce can face numerous obstacles — from slow internet service to awkward and time-consuming access to systems and devices.

This is where digital employee experience (DEX) comes in. DEX tools and services can help organizations enhance the technology their workers use every day, which in turn can lead to improved productivity and increased employee retention.

What is digital employee experience?

Digital employee experience is a measure of how workers perceive and interact with the many digital tools and services they use in the workplace. It examines how employees feel about these technologies, including systems, software, and devices.

Enterprises can deploy a DEX strategy that focuses on tracking, assessing, and improving employees’ technology experience, with the aim of increasing productivity and worker satisfaction.

DEX management tools can support a DEX strategy by aggregating data on usage and performance, analyzing the data, and delivering insights that can help organizations make the necessary enhancements to their technology. For example, a DEX software platform could gauge how easy it is for workers to use a company’s collaboration platforms, how fast the network is during peak hours, or how effective their mobile apps and devices are for performing everyday business tasks.

The main point of DEX is to uncover how employees are dealing with the ever-growing number of technology tools they rely on to do their jobs — and offer solutions to enhancing their experiences. DEX has become more important than ever with the rise of artificial intelligence in the workplace.

Why DEX matters

With the growing reliance on digital tools in the workplace, DEX has become a vital component of IT management. DEX tools and services can lead to potential benefits such as increased productivity, enhanced engagement, better collaboration, and higher employee satisfaction.

“DEX matters because the workplace is primarily digital for most employees, and friction creates compounding impact,” says Dan Wilson, vice president and research analyst, digital workplace, at research firm Gartner.

Digital friction, not technology outages, has become the primary employee problem to manage, Wilson says. Brought on by fragmented technology deployments, inconsistent workflows, and other factors, “friction accumulates when employees can’t find information, miss updates, or work without context,” he says.

Gartner’s research over the past several years shows that persistent digital friction impedes the ability to work, Wilson says. “DEX tools are increasingly being used to identify, prioritize and automate friction remediation, and track improvement using a blend of objective telemetry and employee sentiment,” he says.

Among the common examples of digital friction the research cites are slow application launch time, frequent application crashes or freezes, lag in collaboration tools during meetings or calls, inconsistent performance between office and remote environments, and repeated login prompts during the workday.

“Most digital friction is invisible to IT because employees adapt instead of escalating,” Wilson says. “Friction accumulates across devices, apps, identity, workflows, and support, not in silos. These are not necessarily new issues, but the impact on the workforce increases as employees are increasingly dependent on technology to perform their work tasks.”

DEX is shifting from a nice-to-have IT visibility tool to an operational discipline focused on improving productivity and business outcomes, says Christy Punch, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “DEX isn’t about having a tool; it’s having a measurable way to reduce digital friction that quietly taxes productivity every day and ultimately impacts the bottom line,” she says.

During the pandemic, investments poured into remote software and devices, “but office technology fell by the wayside,” Punch says. “Now, with the push for employees to return to offices, organizations are realizing their physical workplace tech isn’t ready for hybrid collaboration. Employees are vocal about unreliable office experiences,” and IT teams are scrambling to upgrade outdated technologies.

What DEX tools do

At a high level, DEX tools help organizations measure, diagnose, and improve the day-to-day experience of working with technology — using telemetry, sentiment, analytics, and automation, Punch says.

“DEX tools are evolving from ‘visibility dashboards’ into systems of action,” Punch says. “They don’t just detect issues; they increasingly orchestrate fixes and prevent problems. The most important capability expansion is that experience data is no longer trapped in silos by teams.”

DEX is becoming the layer “that connects endpoints, apps, support, and workflows into an end-to-end story, breaks down operational silos, and enables DEX optimization at scale across the business,” she says.

Capabilities have expanded beyond “device health,” Punch says, into areas such as experience visibility, connecting real-time telemetry with qualitative sentiment and feedback to diagnose issues and track trends over time; and proactive remediation, fixing issues before employees are impacted.

DEX meets AI

As is the case with so many other technology offerings, DEX tools are incorporating artificial intelligence capabilities. This helping to make DEX more accessible to departments outside of IT, such as human resources.

DEX tools leverage AI for several functions, Wilson says. These include signal compression, to prioritize massive telemetry data; accelerated diagnosis of issues, through faster anomaly detection/correlation and root‑cause analysis; and natural language interaction, to help executives gain insights and explanations of service issues.

While DEX tools can safely be used by non-IT teams, and some leading organizations do this, it’s not yet a common practice due to “limited IT maturity and collaboration” with the technology, Wilson says.

“AI is now being used to interpret signals, recommend fixes, automate workflows, and drive proactive remediation at scale,” Punch says. “DEX tools are unifying data that traditionally lived in organizational silos, and AI provides insights and issue prioritization in real time.”

With rising costs, heavy tech investments, and the growing influence of AI, organizations are shifting their mindset, Punch says. “Instead of focusing on solution-first, tool-heavy strategies, they’re prioritizing optimization, rationalization, and efficiency at scale,” she says.

Rapid advancements in AI “will push the boundaries of what’s possible in DEX, especially around automated remediation and predictive insights,” Punch says. “Vendors must innovate quickly to stay competitive and meet customer needs.”

DEX and UEM

Many unified endpoint management (UEM) vendors have started to provide real-time measurements of digital employee experience into their platforms, and this gives organizations another option for acquiring DEX capabilities.

Gartner advises clients looking for a DEX tool to prioritize DEX features when selecting a UEM platform or adding these on to existing endpoint management and IT service management tools. This can speed up deployment of DEX capabilities, Wilson says.

That said, DEX capabilities within UEM platforms are typically not as robust as those in dedicated DEX software. “Standalone DEX tools often [are optimal] when deeper experience analytics, broader workload coverage, and stronger closed‑loop automation are required,” Wilson says.

Challenges with the technology

Deploying and maintaining DEX tools can present a number of challenges for organizations.

One is overcoming “actionability gaps,” Wilson says. “IT often uses the tools for dashboards and reports and does not address the process and behavioral changes required to deliver more strategic outcomes,” he says.

Another is overcoming fear of automation. “Technical staff tend to limit widespread use of automation due to [concerns over] appropriate testing, approvals, rollback, and auditability,” Wilson says.

A lot of organizations also need to address the lack of skills or capacity required to use DEX tools effectively. “Many IT teams lack sufficient analytics, automation, service [operations], and employee enablement skills to elevate DEX from a toolset to a strategy,” Wilson says.

Then there’s the issue of who’s responsible for DEX success. DEX spans IT, HR, operations, communications, and business teams, “and fragmented accountability leads to fragmented experiences,” Punch says. In addition, endpoint telemetry, observability, analytics, and sentiment data often live in separate systems, managed by separate teams using disjointed processes, she says.

Finally, there are hurdles related to privacy and trust. “As [employee device] monitoring and AI expand, transparency and governance become non-negotiable,” Punch says. “Ever-evolving data privacy laws, AI regulations, and labor union rules may also play a critical role in how DEX is implemented.”

A market still on the rise

Despite these and other challenges, demand for DEX is rising. This is due in part to an increasingly distributed workforce, application sprawl, faster software update and change cycles, and pressure to improve productivity without adding headcount, Wilson says.

The DEX software market was valued at $1.32 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $2.97 billion by 2032, according to a January 2026 report from Verified Market Research.

The market “has expanded rapidly due to the rise of hybrid and remote work, where the digital environment effectively is the workplace,” the report says.

Success stories: Yamaha, AdventHealth, Southwest Airlines

Companies using DEX are finding it to be a valuable tool for enhancing users’ experiences with technology.

Vehicle manufacturer Yamaha Motor Corp. deployed the ControlUp ONE DEX platform about nine months ago to help address a lack of consistent, reliable data across its endpoint environment, says Faisal Muhammad, head of infrastructure, operations, and end user services.

“We had information coming from multiple sources, but it did not tell a clear story or support confident decision-making,” Muhammad says. “We needed a DEX solution that could give us accurate visibility into our endpoints, validate assumptions we were making about hardware and software, and help us move from opinion-based decisions to data-driven ones. ControlUp addressed that gap by giving us a clear, unified view of our environment.”

The main driver for using DEX was the need for trustworthy data to support major infrastructure and end-user computing decisions. “When I joined Yamaha, we were preparing for a Windows 10 to Windows 11 migration and had been told that roughly 2,000 devices needed to be replaced,” Muhammad says. “There was a $2.4 million budget tied to that estimate, but there was no validated data behind it.”

The company was also dealing with mixed reports and inconsistent asset data, which made it difficult to confidently justify spending. “The goal of deploying DEX was to understand exactly what we had in our environment, what truly needed attention, and where we could avoid unnecessary cost while still meeting deadlines and performance expectations,” Muhammad says.

ControlUp ONE provides deep visibility into endpoint hardware, software, and usage data, and helps turn that data into something meaningful that Muhammad’s team can act on. Beyond cost savings, ControlUp ONE has helped reduce service desk workload, improve transparency with stakeholders, and support better planning and prioritization, he says.

The addition of AI promises even more benefits. “ControlUp is moving in a direction where AI plays a meaningful role, and that is something I am very interested in,” Muhammad says. “From my perspective, the real value of AI in DEX is its ability to analyze historical data, logs, and patterns to help us anticipate and fix problems before employees experience them. You cannot predict the exact moment of an incident, but based on historical data, you know where problems are likely to occur and when.”

The end result is fewer disruptions, faster resolution times, and a better overall experience for employees, while allowing IT teams to handle more issues with less effort.

Another company, healthcare provider AdventHealth, is using Lakeside SysTrack as its enterprise DEX platform. SysTrack has been in place for several years, with a major license expansion between 2022 and 2024, says Sonny Noto, vice president of technology services at AdventHealth. AI and IT service management capabilities are now being enabled to support the service desk and engineering teams, he says.

“We needed to evolve beyond reactive, ticket-based support,” Noto says. “SysTrack’s telemetry and analytics provide predictive visibility into device health, application performance, [and] user friction.” Visibility into the performance of Epic electronic health record (EHR) software has been especially important, he says.

“Before SysTrack, monitoring was fragmented,” Noto says. “SysTrack unified endpoint telemetry, dashboards, and automated incident generation — particularly for clinical workflows.” It also provides visibility into remote connectivity and collaboration experiences to better support hybrid workflows, as well as device health scoring, CPU/memory/storage insights, driver and peripheral health, and application behavior across more than 100,000 endpoints.

“Teams are able to isolate workstation-specific causes of issues that previously appeared to be Epic performance problems,” Noto says.

AdventHealth is actively enabling SysTrack AI, which provides a substantial leap forward in how the company can detect, diagnose, and resolve endpoint issues, Noto says. Among the categories of AI features now in use or being piloted are natural‑language querying across endpoint telemetry, allowing engineers and service desk staff to address a variety of user issues; automated diagnostic findings, with the system’s Pulse feature analyzing thousands of device signals and producing intelligent summaries of root-cause factors; and anomaly detection and early warning indicators for deviations from normal behavior.

The company is building one of the first integrations between SysTrack AI and AI assistant platform Moveworks, combining conversational AI with real-time device intelligence and ensuring immediate consumption of telemetry, health scores, and AI findings, Noto says.

Southwest Airlines began its DEX journey in 2021, with the deployment of Nexthink’s platform. The company was aiming to modernize endpoint visibility and shift from reactive IT operations to a proactive, data-driven model, says Darius Cincan, enterprise endpoint & digital experience leader.

Prior to deploying DEX, Southwest faced challenges including lack of real-time visibility, reactive issue resolution, and inefficiencies in endpoint remediation, Cincan says.

The primary objectives included proactively identifying issues before they impacted employees and reducing disruption to the workforce. “Equally important was the goal of elevating the employee experience by minimizing performance degradation and downtime,” Cincan says.

Nexthink provides real-time monitoring, analytics, and automation across all endpoints, enabling IT teams to detect issues early and remediate them at scale.

“One notable outcome has been the reduction in user login times, achieved by identifying and addressing the underlying causes of slow logons,” Cincan says. “Nexthink has also enabled automated reboot campaigns based on device performance, proactively restoring system stability and improving the day-to-day compute experience for end users.”

In shared device environments, automated logoff of idle user profiles has helped reclaim system resources and reduce profile bloat, Cincan says. “Automated cleanup of unused user profiles and disk space has significantly reduced storage consumption, mitigating ‘disk full’ conditions that can block operating system updates, application installations, and security patching,” he says. This has reduced the need to procure higher-capacity storage hardware, resulting in cost savings.

Nexthink has strengthened root cause analysis capabilities by correlating endpoint telemetry across hardware, operating system, application, and user experience data, which has shortened troubleshooting cycles and cut dependency on multi-team investigations, Cincan says.

The platform supports natural language queries, allowing IT teams to ask questions in plain English and receive contextual insights, recommendations, and links to relevant dashboards or knowledge resources, Cincan says. “AI-driven insights automatically assess alert scope and impact, enabling teams to prioritize the most critical issues,” he says.

By automating remediation, improving visibility, and leveraging AI-driven insights, Southwest Airlines has reduced operational friction and shifted IT from a reactive support function to a proactive experience enabler, Cincan says.

This story was originally published in August 2022 and updated in March 2026.