The 2023 Gartner® Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms provides insights for DAP adoption 

“By 2025, 70% of organizations will use digital adoption platforms within their technology stack to overcome still-insufficient application user experiences.” 

– Gartner, Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms, Melissa Hilbert, Stephen Emmott, Maria Marino, Tim Faith, 11 September 2023.

From our perspective, the Gartner Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms is one of the leading pieces of research on the DAP sphere, focusing on individual vendors and their capabilities, as well as where the industry is heading. According to Gartner, “Organizations seeking to accelerate digital transformation must remove digital friction and improve technology usage. Enterprise application leaders in partnership with lines of business should examine digital adoption platforms that enable employees and/or customers to better adopt technology.”  

According to the 2023 Gartner Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms, “often, digital frustration arises from an organization’s business processes, not the application. Through analytics and data insights, a DAP enables businesses to optimize their digital processes by identifying areas for improvement, and measure the overall success of digital transformation initiatives.”

To ensure that organizations get the most out of their DAP, Gartner identifies five areas of importance: 

• Machine learning (ML) – Gartner states that, “DAPs will use ML to recommend more personalized guidance for the end user. DAPs will also recommend guidance for administrators to suggest not only a guidance or workflow where there isn’t one, but also the actual guidance steps. In the longer term, guidance would be created, providing insights as to why it was created and seeking the administrator to approve the automated suggestion. 
• Generative AI – Gartner mentions that, “Generative AI is either emerging or on the roadmaps of most vendors in this Market Guide. Customers should expect the use of GenAI to: Return search results and automatically start guidance; Retrieve and summarize answers to natural language questions using various sources; Include generative AI bots to help users surface information and guidance; Generate insights based on customer or employee feedback; Not replace, but augment, the human in accomplishing work.”   

• Process automation – Gartner states that, “Some vendors provide light process automation within an application. Expect automation to improve to retrieve information from different applications and support business process automation cross applications. This will provide better automation of end-to-end business processes.”

• Ease of use – According to Gartner, “Ease of use is perceived differently by every individual, so it is difficult to measure. In this case, DAPs are meant to be administered  through the building of content and workflow streams. The DAP administrator may report into a line of business (LOB), operations, learning and development, IT, or a combination of the aforementioned. It is important that these guidances are easy to build, maintain and modify over time. Look for low-/no-code and WYSIWYG-type interfaces for content building.”  

• Analytics – According to Gartner, “Vendor-provided analytics vary from simple guidance tracking or usage of the platform to extended capabilities such as integrations with third-party business intelligence (BI) tools. Expect an increase in vendor abilities to support large digital transformation goals. Look for the introduction of business KPI benchmarking and tracking through the DAP.”

• Governance and resourcing – The report states that, “Gartner expects to see vendors providing more support for global rollouts of their platforms, including guidance on governance. While it is reasonable to expect that one individual can manage an application or two, this is not a long-term solution for supporting the use of a DAP. Hiring the right staff and establishing governance are essential to building a team to programmatically manage DAPs as a technology, build content, manage changes and consider design.”

 

WalkMe is recognized as a Representative Vendor for DAPs

Of the 12 vendors listed in the 2023 Gartner Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms, WalkMe is recognized as a Representative Vendor for DAPs. Additionally, WalkMe is one of three recognized vendors that offers generative AI capabilities. 

Our generative AI capabilities include 14 AI-focused patents embedded into our platform, enabling your organization to:

• Eliminate digital friction with insights that detail software engagement, error rates, and tasks that can be automated. 
• Auto-generate user experiences to optimize in-app guidance, including through detailed visuals, charts, illustrations, and content. 
• Accelerate productivity with conversational guidance in any software, delivering employees a frictionless work experience. 

To learn more about the current state of the DAP industry and WalkMe, download the 2023 Gartner Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms today.

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