2026 Gartner® Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms

Adoption is where AI investment turns into AI performance.

AI is changing work faster than people absorb it. Our take on the 2026 Gartner® Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms: help employees adopt AI, change how work gets done and measure the results.

Gartner report · Published 31 August 2026

The work changes before the habits do.

New AI features change familiar tasks. Employees need to learn new ways of working while keeping the day’s work moving.

Use the guide to make an adoption decision you can defend, weighing what to build, what to buy and the ongoing costs.

Over the next five years, Gartner expects that it will prove more cost-effective to buy a commercial off-the-shelf product than to build, improve and maintain what can be built enterprisewide.

Gartner, Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms, Melissa Hilbert, Maria Marino, Stephen Emmott, 31 August 2026.

Gartner does not endorse any company, vendor, product or service depicted in its publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s business and technology insights organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this publication, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. GARTNER is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.

New workflows, surfaced by AI.

By 2028, 40% of organizations will use GenAI, supplied in their DAPs, to automatically surface new workflows to employees.

Gartner, Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms, Melissa Hilbert, Maria Marino, Stephen Emmott, 31 August 2026. GARTNER is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.”

Plan for adoption over the years ahead.

Mitigate risk during major enterprise application rollouts and traditional SaaS applications suffering from adoption issues over the next five to ten years by deploying DAPs.

Gartner, Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms, Melissa Hilbert, Maria Marino, Stephen Emmott, 31 August 2026. GARTNER is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.”

Why enterprises evaluate WalkMe.

One platform. Every capability across every surface.

WalkMe supports all 30 capabilities and five deployment modalities identified in the report.

What this means for your teams

Put existing AI to work

Help employees apply existing AI across applications. WalkMe adds screen context and surfaces agents such as SAP Joule and Microsoft Copilot Studio.

See whether work improves

Find where employees stall and whether changes help. WalkMe tracks workflow completion and adoption across applications.

Know what your budget covers

Budget for usage as well as your license. WalkMe includes Contextual AI in the license; model usage charges apply under your Microsoft, SAP or Google agreements.

Questions to ask before you invest

What is a digital adoption platform?

A digital adoption platform (DAP) is software that adds contextual guidance to the applications employees and customers use, helping them learn tasks and complete work. Its analytics show how people use the guidance, giving organizations information to improve adoption and reduce digital friction.

What capabilities should a digital adoption platform provide?

Per Gartner, default to purchasing a commercial DAP in the short to medium term (three- to five-year contract agreements) to avoid the hidden costs of building and maintaining an organization wide custom solution. Gartner also said, evaluate whether your organization has the resources and maturity to build and govern a custom enterprise agent layer using foundational models to facilitate adoption.

How do digital adoption platforms support AI adoption?

DAPs can bring guidance and business context into daily work, connect with assistants and agents, and use GenAI to create or maintain guidance. Utilize DAPs to initiate light automation of workflows now, positioning the organization to transition more smoothly to fully automated, agentic ways of working – whether within the DAP or through agentic development – over the next two to five years.

What AI costs should buyers consider?

Conduct a rigorous cost-benefit analysis before adopting new AI-native capabilities offered by DAP vendors and compare against the resources and costs of building internally, as DAP pricing for AI is consumption-based. Buyers and users can mitigate the impact of consumption-based pricing by insisting on usage monitoring at user and team levels.

What you’ll learn

2026 Gartner® Market Guide for Digital Adoption Platforms

When to buy a commercial DAP, and which building and maintenance costs to consider.
How to assess AI capabilities and monitor consumption-based usage costs.
Where the path to agentic workflows is introduced via light automation based on real task execution recorded from your DAP.
Which capabilities Gartner defines as mandatory, and which are optional.

Enterprise teams use WalkMe.

2026