Digital Adoption Platforms

Gartner's Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms, published September 3, 2025, describes a market changing its own verb. The DAP taught users how to use software, the show-me layer: tours, tooltips, guidance that sits on top of the application. The guide says the market is on the cusp of transformation toward do-it-for-me: the platform that runs the software on the user's behalf, orchestrating AI agents across applications.

The verb that changed

The digital adoption platform was born to answer one question: why is the software we bought not being used. The answer the market sold was guidance, an overlay that showed users what to click, when, and why.

The 2025 guide describes the next answer, and it is a different verb. Do-it-for-me means the platform does not show the user the workflow; it executes the workflow, with agents coordinating across the applications. The DAP's guidance layer becomes the orchestration layer, and the user moves from operator to supervisor.

The DAP taught humans software. The next version runs it for them.

The September 2025 Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms, and the split inside it

The guide published September 3, 2025, authored by Melissa Hilbert, Maria Marino, Joe Mariano, and Stephen Emmott.

Its market definition spans a bifurcated field. On one side, the employee experience vendors: WalkMe, Whatfix, Nexthink, Oracle, myMeta, tts, focused on enterprise adoption, productivity, and change management. On the other, the customer experience vendors: Amplitude, Appcues, Pendo, focused on behavioral analytics, feedback, and experimentation. A few vendors serve both, and the split matters because the two sides are heading toward different fates under the agentic shift.

The market's size makes the stakes concrete: roughly 1.042 billion dollars in 2024, growing 27.7 percent year over year.

The friction tax

The guide's demand-side number is the category's quiet justification: Gartner's 2024 Digital Worker Survey found productivity fell between 9 and 12 percentage points over two years, driven by digital friction.

That is the tax the DAP exists to collect. Every overlay that prevents a support ticket, every guided workflow that replaces a training class, every nudge that turns a dormant feature into an adopted one, is a claim against that 9 to 12 point loss. The market grew 27.7 percent in a year because enterprises finally priced the friction.

Digital friction has a price tag, and Gartner measured it.

The orchestrator bet

The guide's transformation thesis is specific: DAPs become orchestrators coordinating multiple first-party and third-party AI agents and assistants across applications, providing real-time user context, triggering multi-application actions, and closing feedback loops that prove value.

The numbers support the direction. AI-driven guidance and workflow automation features are already adopted by approximately 55 percent of DAP vendors, and Gartner predicts that by 2028, 40 percent of organizations will use generative AI embedded in their DAPs to automatically surface new workflows to employees.

The orchestrator seat is the one worth competing for, because it is the position from which the DAP becomes the employee's operating system rather than the application's overlay.

The existential question

The guide contains its own threat, stated plainly: AI agents built by application vendors themselves may threaten the DAP's customer experience use case, as the applications ship their own assistants.

That is the market's existential loop. The DAP grew up teaching users software the applications did not bother to teach. If the applications now build competent assistants natively, the overlay's reason for existing shrinks on the CX side. The DAP's answer is the orchestrator bet: the value moves up from teaching one application to coordinating many.

An agent inside every application is the DAP's biggest threat and its biggest opportunity, and the vendors that win are the ones that own the layer above all the agents.

What the guide leaves for the buyer

A Market Guide names representative vendors and does not rank them, and this one's honest limit is the transformation it describes: the vendors are mid-flight, some still overlay companies, some already orchestrators, and the same guide that describes the destination warns the buyer to evaluate vendors on their ability to support AI agents and cross-application journeys, not their current guidance polish.

The bifurcation compounds it. The employee-side and CX-side vendors will not converge smoothly; they are two businesses sharing a category name, and the buyer's side of the split should be settled before the shortlist.

Four questions for the adoption buyer

Which side of the split is the purchase? Employee adoption or customer experience. The vendors cluster, the requirements do not, and the same shortlist should not serve both.

Is the vendor an overlay or an orchestrator? Ask for a cross-application workflow demonstration: two agents, two systems, one outcome, with the context flowing between them. The answer separates the market's present from its future.

What does the friction actually cost? The 9 to 12 point productivity loss is the market's average. Measure your own before the purchase, because the DAP's value case inherits your number.

Does the application vendor already ship an assistant? If the software in scope has a native agent, the DAP's role changes from teaching to orchestrating. Buy for the role the stack actually needs.

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The same shift shows up next door, in Frontline Worker Communication Applications. No Magic Quadrant exists for the deskless majority of the workforce; the closest coverage lives buried inside the office-worker UCaaS quadrant, as a niche feature most vendors still treat as an afterthought.

The related category on this site is Employee Experience Management Platforms. Forrester's current map covers twenty nine vendors selling seven genuinely different products, from survey tools to HCM suites. Employee experience management is not a product category, it is an outcome that seven product categories claim to deliver.