Celebrating the Inaugural DEX Innovation Awards

Nexthink is launching the inaugural DEX Innovation Awards at Nexthink Experience 2026, the global DEX summit.  

These awards will recognize the industry leaders working incredibly hard, and in remarkably creative ways to transform the digital workplace and improve the digital employee experience for their colleagues. Much of that work happens quietly: an automated workflow that prevents a thousand tickets before anyone notices, an insight that changes how a leadership team thinks about its AI strategy, a conversation with a personal IT agent that instantly solves an employee issue. We wanted to take this pivotal moment in IT, on the biggest stage in DEX, to recognize the industry leaders transforming the IT operating model and driving the future digital employee experience forward.  

The DEX Innovation Awards consists of three categories: 

DEXOps Leader of the Year: Recognizing an individual who built and championed a successful DEXOps program within their organization.  

DEX Business Impact Award: Recognizing an organization that achieved exceptional business value through their digital employee experience initiatives with Nexthink.  

AI Trailblazer Award: Recognizing an organization leading the way with innovative and impactful use of AI Drive, Spark, and/or Workspace.  

Key themes from this year’s nominations: 

Taken together, the nominations highlight the state of the industry, DEX maturity, and the leadership skills necessary to drive impactful change and transformation.  

Zero tickets is now a realistic goal. Nearly every submission described the same journey: moving away from ticket-driven firefighting, toward proactive and predictive service delivery. Several organizations have gone further and set explicit goals to eliminate reactive ticketing altogether. What was an aspiration a few years ago is now a new IT operating model with a roadmap attached.  

The scoreboard has changed. The strongest nominations showed they no longer measure success with the standard metrics. They measure it in multi-million-dollar productivity savings, hundreds of thousands of recovered hours, avoided hardware and licensing spend, and protected revenue and reduced compliance exposure. One nominee shared how they reduced support call times by over 150 million minutes in a single year. DEX teams have learned to speak finance.  

DEX has evolved into an operating model: DEXOps. The strongest organizations are building the people, processes, governance, and measurement around DEX to continuously turn employee experience data into action. Centers of Excellence, dedicated DEX offices, use-case onboarding frameworks, persona-based analytics, XLAs, and formal value-realization models are becoming the structure that makes that possible. 

Nomination after nomination showed leaders going beyond implementing technology. They were building a new way of running IT around the employee experience: identifying friction, prioritizing what matters, fixing and automating at scale, measuring the outcome, and continuously improving. In many cases, that meant creating teams, governance models, and even roles that had never existed in their organizations before. 

IT problems are now business problems. When 180,000 vulnerabilities are reported in one day, the CIO and CEO take notice. A well-running digital workplace is crucial for organization to stay competitive. Executive sponsorship, monthly C-suite reporting, publicly stated organizational targets, are essential for a successful IT and business strategic partnership. IT used to think being invisible was the ultimate measure of success. These nominees are showing through monthly briefings, strategic AI rollouts, and vulnerability response that more visibility with leadership is the ultimate measure of success.   

DEX is proving itself at the hardest moments. Some of the most compelling stories weren't steady-state operations at all. They were the high-stakes transitions: enterprise-wide Windows 11 migrations, moves to standardized digital workplaces, a corporate separation into two companies, an M&A integration blueprint, three thousand colleagues relocating into a new global headquarters in a single week. In each case, these leaders highlighted how their visibility and reach across the digital workplace can drive informed decisions and business strategy in even the hardest changes. 

DEX’s impact is felt beyond EUC teams. In multiple cases we saw that teams consistently showcased further reaching use cases, expanding DEX into the business including compliance and risk management, hardware lifecycle and capital planning, sustainability, software license reclamation, and enterprise strategic programs. Several nominees tied their DEX work directly to their organization's mission showcasing how DEX teams can deliver greater value to the business when they scale beyond firefighting and reactive IT.  

AI's hard problem is visibility, not availability. Across the AI nominations, the challenge was never getting tools into people's hands. It was knowing whether adoption was real, safe, and valuable to the business. The innovators in this space leveraged license optimization, shadow-AI reduction, and governance through education rather than restriction.  Crucial to these innovators is to keep a people-first mentality ensuring the digital employee experience is improved and that AI is expanding what a workforce can do, and how efficiently it can do it. 

Community building is the accelerant. Nearly every nominee evangelized beyond their own walls by speaking at events, mentoring peers, contributing to the Nexthink Ambassador community, leading initiatives like Women in DEX, or shaping future DEX innovations with product feedback and testing. Several nominees credited close partnerships with their service providers and partners as central to what they achieved. When it comes to DEX, there is no gatekeeping. These leaders are working together to drive digital workplace transformation faster and more efficiently than ever before.  

Congratulations to the 2026 DEX Innovation Award nominees 

While there can only be one winner in each category, we want to thank everyone who was submitted and congratulate this year’s selected nominees. 

DEXOps Leader of the Year  

• Bhavin Shah, Director, Data, Insights and Automation, End User Services, Johnson & Johnson  
• Cory J Harvey, Global Lead for Digital Experience, EY  
• Florian Herrmann, IT Specialist, BMW via MSP Partner Computacenter  
• Aaron Bernard, Associate Director DEXOps, AbbVie  
• Mitch Trychta, Lead, DEX Programs & Research, Vizient  
• Monia Canavari, Head of Workplace Technology, NTT Data  
• Punit Jain, Sr. Director, Global Digital Workplace Experience, Mondelez  
• Santhosh Indukuri, Project Lead, DEX, Sony Interactive Entertainment  
• Sarah Jones, Senior Director, Global Site Operations and Executive Services, GSK  
• Sunil Dayal, Head of Device and Operations, Sony Corporation  

DEX Business Impact Award  

• Azelis Group NV  
• Bancolombia via MSP Partner Unisys  
• Computacenter  
• DB Systel  
• ExxonMobil  
• Honeywell  Technologies
• Marsh  
• NTT Internal IT  
• Sony Corporation  
• Sony Interactive Entertainment  

AI Trailblazer Award  

• AbbVie  
• Aon  
• Kelly  
• Leidos  

Thank you  

To everyone nominated, thank you. These awards exist because the work you're doing deserves a stage, and because the rest of the DEX community learns from the examples you set and the accomplishments you share. We're excited to see you at Experience ’26 in Orlando, Florida and present the awards to this year’s winners!