The Evolution of Digital Adoption: Insights from Gartner’s 2025 Market Guide
The 2025 Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) marks an important point in the evolution of the category. Digital adoption has matured from a supporting role into a central part of enterprise strategy. Organizations are no longer asking if they need a DAP—they’re asking which one.
In this latest research, Gartner establishes DAPs as essential to business transformation, efficiency, and employee experience. The takeaway is clear: digital adoption is no longer optional. It has become a defining element in the future of digital work.
When DEX Meets DAP, Magic Happens
The Market Guide makes an important point: the line between digital adoption and digital employee experience (DEX) is blurring.
So, what is DEX? DEX is an employee’s holistic experience with the digital workplace provided by IT. It refers to the complete digital environment employees encounter at work, everything from the devices and applications they use to the way IT support, performance, and sentiment are managed. A strong DEX strategy ensures employees are not just productive but engaged and satisfied with their digital workplace.
Now DEX can be extended into the user experience of the application.. With DAP, guidance, automation, and analytics improve employee productivity inside the application by helping employees navigate and master applications in real time. Together, they don’t just enable smoother user journeys, they provide a 360-degree view of the employee experience across applications.
The combination of DAP and DEX insights provides end-to-end application intelligence never before seen. Today, enterprises can finally understand not only what employees are doing in applications, but where they struggle and how they feel about those experiences. Even more impressive, organizations can act on those issues, whether they are technical, user-related, or application-specific.
This is where Nexthink is uniquely positioned. As the founder of DEX, we’re once again expanding the boundaries of digital employee experience to include digital adoption. With our industry defining product Nexthink Adopt, adoption is no longer a siloed overlay, it’s embedded into the experience itself. The two worlds of DEX and DAP are converging, just like Gartner says.
Nexthink’s Year-on-Year Progress: From 2024 to 2025
One of the most exciting parts of Gartner’s 2025 analysis is how it highlights Nexthink’s progress since last year’s Market Guide.
In 2024, Nexthink Adopt was recognized for its campaign management, experience mining, and strong analytics. Fast-forward to 2025, and Gartner showcases significant new enhancements:
- Nexthink Assist – an AI assistant that responds to natural language and extracts and analyzes usage data, performs contextual searches across documentation, and creates employee-facing campaigns.
- Writing AI assistant – offers contextual feedback for structured writing tasks and ensures compliance with organizational standards.
- GenAI translations – automatically localizes guide content based on user settings.
- Anonymized benchmarks and guide library – benchmarking across customers and access to prebuilt guides.
- Action buttons – enabling users to launch automations directly from guidance flows.
Even more importantly, Gartner highlights our roadmap: guide generation without configuration (based on user context), deeper experience mining, and an in-app chatbot that can interact with other AI agents.
This shift from basic in-app guidance to AI-enabled orchestration shows a vendor keeping pace – and in some areas leading – the direction Gartner says the market is headed.
Digital Adoption Platform Features That Matter Most – According to Gartner
Gartner continues to stress mandatory and differentiating capabilities buyers should demand in a DAP:
- Cross-application contextual guidance – because processes rarely live in one app.
- Surveys/feedback – for capturing employee voice at the point of work.
- Task mining – for capturing how employees complete work and surfacing friction points that can be optimized.
- Machine learning for both end-user and admin guidance – so adoption flows and content creation continuously improve.
- AI assistants, GenAI recommendations, and workflow automation – to move from “show me” to “do it for me.”
Download the Digital Adoption Buyer’s Guide to determine the key features for your organization.
What Gartner’s 2025 Vision Means for Buyers
For organizations considering a Digital Adoption Platform, Gartner’s 2025 Market Guide validates that the category is entering a new phase: one where AI, analytics, and cross-application orchestration converge. Nexthink Adopt isn’t just keeping up, it’s expanding capabilities in precisely the areas Gartner says will define the future.
For IT leaders, that means a platform that reduces tickets, accelerates transformation, and ties adoption to measurable business outcomes. For employees, it means guidance that feels contextual, personalized, and embedded into the flow of their digital work.
See the report for yourself! Download the Gartner Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms here.