Workplace technology is meant to make work easier and more hands-free — but for many teams, introduing new tech can actually makes it more congested and confusing. 

In a survey of 2,000 workers across 10 industries, more than half say too many disconnected digital tools compromise productivity. Almost 60% waste 11 hours a week searching for information across systems, and 90% feel overwhelmed by the number of tools needed to get work done. 

Digital employee experience (DEX) tools help create a path out of the chaos. 

Enterprise teams struggling with hybrid work, SaaS complexity, and distributed workflows are turning to DEX tools to identify digital friction across devices, applications, and processes — and help their technology better empower employees.

In this blog, we’ll look at the different kinds of DEX tools, common gaps, and how AI operationalizes DEX data to enable measurable outcomes like proactive issue management and improved productivity.

How DEX tools support enterprise operations

Happy employees are productive employees. It's a cliché, but one backed by research from Frontiers in Psychology.

In modern enterprises where employees spend their days in the digital workplace, DEX tools have become a foundational layer for supporting employee satisfaction — while also driving operational efficiency, resilience, and scale.

The digital employee experience (DEX) comprises the quality of every interaction your employees have with enterprise tech and systems — from devices and applications to workflows, access, and support channels.

DEX tools, then, are the technologies, platforms, and systems that empower employees to communicate, collaborate, and get work done effectively across those digital environments every day, while giving IT and business teams the visibility and control needed to continuously improve them.

For large-scale enterprises spanning global offices and diverse employee setups, the right DEX tools can be the difference between fragmented, frustrating experiences and well-oiled productivity that supports employee satisfaction, faster onboarding, smoother change management, and reduced operational costs.

For example, DEX tools help IT, HR, and Digital Workplace teams proactively identify, diagnose, and resolve issues dragging down workplace productivity (like access failures, slow devices, or broken workflows), automate common fixes, surface actionable insights, and prioritize improvements before small problems spiral into major incidents — improving service quality while reducing support burden.

Core categories of digital employee experience tools

For large-scale enterprises dealing with tech sprawl and distributed workforces, the most impactful DEX tools provide end-to-end visibility and early warning signals to curb digital friction before it impacts employees’ work.

Endpoint and device experience tools

Endpoint and device experience tools continuously monitor and manage the health, security, and performance of employee devices. They help ensure all laptops, desktops, and mobile endpoints are up to date, stable, and ready to support employees as they do their best work. 

That means tracking signals like: 

• OS stability: Update failures or system crashes
• Hardware performance: CPU usage or storage issues
• Latency: Connectivity problems that slow applications
• Battery health: Degradation that impacts employee productivity
• Crash analytics: Patterns in application or system crashes 
• Proactive maintenance: Alerts to catch issues early before productivity drops

Moveworks Employee Experience Insights

Employee Experience Insights (EXI) gives a unified, real-time view of the employee experience, highlighting friction and prioritizing resolution for maximum impact.

EXI uses natural language understanding (NLU) and machine learning to analyze unstructured text in support tickets and service desk conversations, like “the VPN keeps dropping” or “my laptop is overheating.”

By surfacing recurring patterns, IT support teams can spot VPN failures, hardware problems, and other workflow issues — and then step in to stop small problems from becoming major disruptions.

Ideal for: Proactive employee experience management

VMware Workspace ONE

VMware Workspace ONE is a unified endpoint management (UEM) platform that monitors application and device health issues (like responsiveness and crashes) to identify issues before they impact employees. 

Ideal for: Enterprises already using VMware

Application and workflow experience analytics

These tools monitor how employees interact with applications, tools, and processes to determine which solutions actually support employees and which slow them down. 

They typically track: 

• SaaS performance: Load times or outages that disrupt work 
• Error-tracing: Recurring app failures that block access
• Authentication failures: MFA or SSO problems that prevent logins
• Workflow completion rates: Moments where employees get stuck or drop off
• App-specific friction: Sluggish interfaces that cause delays

AppDynamics

AppDynamics is an observability and digital experience monitoring platform that tracks application performance and end-user experience to show how technical issues impact employee workflows and business outcomes. 

Ideal for: Code-level diagnostics and error-tracing

ServiceNow Performance Analytics

ServiceNow Performance Analytics tracks KPIs and benchmarks to help you evaluate performance, flag recurring issues, and identify improvement opportunities. 

Ideal for: Overseeing performance across teams and applications

Moveworks AI Assistant Insights

AI Assistant Insights provides comprehensive visibility into how employees use the Moveworks AI Assistant across enterprise apps,, surfacing patterns like: 

• Most-used apps (Zoom, Workday, Microsoft Teams)
• Common friction points (repeated access requests, stalled approvals)
• Popular support topics (password resets, software installs)

These insights help leaders pinpoint where automation can better optimize the employee experience and continuously improve both support quality and ROI. For example, if employees frequently struggle with password resets, then IT could deploy a plugin that helps users independently reset their passwords.

Employee feedback and sentiment tools

Employee feedback and sentiment DEX tools provide a direct lens into how employees experience the digital workplace. Through pulse surveys, in-app insights, and other friction reporting, leaders can discover employees’ biggest pain points, what changes they want, and how technology impacts their work. 

But while surveys offer important insight, listening alone isn’t enough to drive improvements. After collecting feedback, it’s up to leaders to act on the data and implement changes to close the loop. 

Workday Peakon Employee Voice

Workday Peakon Employee Voice is a continuous listening platform that collects real-time employee feedback via automated pulse surveys, then uses sentiment analysis and machine learning to identify trends and recommend improvements. 

Ideal for: Capturing direct employee sentiment

Qualtrics EmployeeXM

The Qualtrics EmployeeXM platform captures feedback from the entire employee lifecycle — from onboarding to offboarding. Predictive analytics help you find the root causes of friction, like burnout or poor employee engagement. 

Ideal for: Customizable dashboards for deeper analysis 

Digital workplace analytics

With digital workplace analytics tools, you can examine the employee journey across different departments to understand where workflows break down. They help leaders identify and tackle friction points like: 

• IT: Which devices or applications repeatedly cause help desk tickets? 
• HR: During onboarding, where do employees miss key information? 
• Finance: Where do approval chains break down and cause bottlenecks?

Nexthink

Nexthink offers real-time visibility into how employees interact with devices, applications, and workflows, combining technical data and qualitative feedback to pinpoint friction and recommend fixes. 

Ideal for: Root cause analysis and automated remediation

Visier People Analytics

With Visier People Analytics, you get a centralized view of the employee experience — from hire to retire — using predictive analytics to identify drivers behind turnover, disengagement, and performance issues.

Ideal for: HR-focused analyses of the employee journey 

Where traditional DEX tools fall short for enterprise teams

There are many different kinds of DEX tools promising insights into the employee experience, but not all of them provide the most meaningful or actionable information. In fact, some of them only add to the noise and confusion, leaving you with: 

• Dashboard fatigue: More dashboards isn’t always helpful. Some tools give you metrics galore but no clues about where to start or how to prioritize actions. 
• Insights without action: Red/yellow/green health scores and other snapshot metrics seem helpful at first, but they don’t translate to action. Modern DEX tools must move beyond reporting to initiate real-life problem-solving. 
• Lack of context: Tools focused just on IT or just HR miss the big-picture employee experience. Without cross-functional insights, you only get enough information to fix superficial symptoms — not the root causes you need to truly improve the experience.
• Reactive loops: Scattered insights keep your IT team constantly firefighting and creating one-off fixes. Modern DEX tools should connect the dots between different systems to uncover patterns and empower proactive improvements. 

For large-scale enterprises managing thousands of devices and employees, basic DEX tools that simply flag problems aren’t enough. What’s missing is proactive automation powered by agentic AI. 

To truly improve the employee experience, leaders need DEX tools that move from dashboards to automated outcomes at scale. 

How agentic AI expands and strengthens DEX initiatives

Most DEX tools lack a true agentic AI layer — the missing ingredient that takes leadership from just identifying friction points to actually improving the employee experience. 

Agentic AI is designed to reason, plan, and take action toward a goal. Instead of relying on static rules or simple triggers, it evaluates context across systems, determines the best next step, and then executes that step autonomously. This shift from passive monitoring to purposeful action is what turns insights into outcomes.

Turning DEX signals into automated resolution

When a DEX strategy includes agentic AI, it becomes intelligent enough to move from surface-level monitoring to autonomous problem-solving. In other words, where a traditional DEX solution monitors and flags, agentic AI takes action to close the loop by resolving issues – helping to reduce friction in real time and improving the DEX at scale.

• An employee asks about their benefits and gets results from Workday instantly. 
• IT operations checks on an open incident and gets a real-time summary without opening the ticketing system.
• A manager requests meeting details and gets attendees and action items without switching apps. 

Learn the most important employee experience metrics to track and why agentic AI is the missing link to meaningful action. 

Multi-system reasoning for accurate diagnosis

Traditional DEX tools typically collect data and flag problems, but they don’t explain why there’s friction. 

By analyzing telemetry data, app data, identity signals, and user context, agentic AI can actually understand what’s happening to better uncover root causes and answer questions like:

• Is access blocked due to an expired permission? 
• Is the delay caused by misrouted approvals?
• Is this ticket surge related to a recent software update? 

DEX tools with agentic AI don’t analyze data in isolation. Instead, they are able to combine signals from HR, IT, and business systems across the organization to move from surface-level tracking to intelligent, multi-system understanding.

Support employees in the moment of need

Bottlenecks and digital friction aren’t just issues for IT departments to monitor. They're frustrating realities for employees who need simple, in-flow ways to get unstuck, fast.

What they don’t need is another survey or support ticket that slows them down and still leaves them without an answer. 

DEX tools with agentic AI meet employees where they are in the flow of work and provide real help, solving problems when and where they happen, so they can move forward without delay. 

Traditional setup: When an employee needs to reset MFA, they have to submit a ticket and wait for help from busy IT teams.

Agentic AI: An employee simply asks in the chat and gets instant, in-flow resolution. 

Proactive experience management

Agentic AI means leadership doesn’t have to wait for employees to report problems before making improvements. 

When integrated into DEX tools, proactive AI agents can detect emerging trends in employee workflows and send automatic alerts when performance dips below a defined threshold. This enables leadership teams to take proactive action and prevent small issues from turning into larger disruptions that impact productivity. 

Plus, because agentic AI works across point tools, it can also unify signals to help enterprise teams work together and coordinate action for greater employee satisfaction. 

Evaluating DEX tools for your enterprise environment

Leaders should look for DEX tools that can anticipate and respond to employee needs at scale so everyone is empowered to do their best work. That requires:

Breadth of telemetry and cross-platform coverage

Challenge: With thousands of devices and dozens of SaaS platforms, it’s a grand feat to track identity layers, VPNs, region-specific configurations, and network variability. 

What you need: Consistent, reliable telemetry across devices, apps, OSs, and networks to give leaders a complete picture of employee friction, wherever it occurs.

Accuracy of insights and the ability to connect data across systems

Challenge: Siloed metrics and surface-level monitoring only treat symptoms. They don’t explain the root causes.

What you need: Cross-functional insights that correlate signals from your many devices, apps, and workflows to identify and be able to solve underlying problems. 

Ease of integration into existing IT and HR ecosystems

Challenge: Many DEX tools struggle to integrate with legacy tech stacks, creating new silos and fragmented dashboards.

What you need: Easy integration with existing enterprise systems, enabling consolidated visibility without extra overhead.

Global and hybrid workforce readiness

Challenge: Global organizations have a lot of ground to cover: diverse time zones, network conditions, compliance requirements, and layers. Hybrid work adds even more endpoints and visibility challenges. 

What you need: Reliable data collection and management, across different devices, locations, and network environments. 

Ability to scale with app sprawl

Challenge: Enterprises constantly add and sunset applications, contributing to license sprawl and varied usage patterns. 

What you need: DEX tools that can adapt to shifting tech stacks, while maintaining reliable visibility and minimizing manual overhead. 

Governance and security standards

Challenge: Monitoring employee devices and behavior requires strict data controls, particularly in regulated industries.

What you need: Enterprise-grade security, auditability, and clear data governance. 

Support model and resource impact on existing teams

Challenge: Some DEX tools require ongoing maintenance or manual intervention to move from monitoring to issue resolution.  

What you need: Tools powered by agentic AI can autonomously take action to reduce friction and optimize the employee experience, without introducing additional noise or manual work.

Move from insight to action with agentic AI

DEX tools generate a lot of data about your work environment, but that data isn’t always useful. Without the ability to connect systems, diagnose root causes, and take autonomous action to resolve issues, most tools just create overwhelm and a long list of manual tasks. 

By combining DEX visibility and EXI insights with an agentic AI platform that unifies enterprise search and automation, Moveworks turns your digital experience data into action to reduce friction, increase productivity, and improve the employee experience across your tech stack. Here's how we do it:

• Understand employee requests in natural language and route it to the right answer, workflow, or remediation in seconds.
• Resolve issues at scale with multi-system reasoning that goes beyond visibility to deliver real remediation — not just surface symptoms.
• Orchestrate end-to-end actions across enterprise applications, from HR to IT to Finance, without manual triage or routing.

Ready to turn DEX insights into real-time action? Explore how the Moveworks AI Assistant closes the loop.