It’s time for SMBs to take digital employee experience seriously

For a long time, Digital Employee Experience (DEX) lived in the rarefied air of the enterprise world. Yes, it was powerful, but it was also complex. And frankly, too expensive for most small and medium sized companies.

When I worked as a Forrester analyst and wrote the first (and second … and third) evaluation of DEX providers in 2020, 2022, and 2024, respectively, I couldn’t help but notice: almost every single customer reference was a household name that might come up around the dinner table. Big banks, giant consulting companies, pharmaceutical conglomerates, insurance providers, airlines, global restaurant chains—if you had heard of the company, chances are they were starting to think about DEX.

In the early days of the market, when these pioneering companies were first making the jump into DEX, that made sense. Why? Because if you wanted to make DEX work back then, you needed three things:

1. Deep technical expertise—because early use cases were all about mining large, complex data sets do things like rationalize your VDI environment or compare laptop specs across OEMs.
2. Dedicated teams—to develop use cases, conduct interviews, run surveys, and keep the engine running. With something so new, you needed a dedicated team if you had any hope of achieving ROI. In some cases, these teams reached upwards of 30 individuals.
3. Big budgets—because the business benefits scaled with company size, and so did the investment. DEX deals routinely surpassed $1 million in budget, but they also had the scale to quickly recoup hundreds of thousands of dollars in software licenses.

In the enterprise, these investments made sense. They could justify building a “DEX Center of Excellence” because the ROI was there. But for small and mid-sized businesses (SMB), DEX remained a pipedream.

The game-changer: AI levels the playing field  

“At the beginning, just know that DEX illuminates more problems than it solves,” remarked one IT leader at a US-based utilities provider. I used to hear that that sentiment commonly during the early days of DEX, but these days, the notion has faded. That’s because something big has shifted, and it’s now allowing DEX to go downstream to SMBs: the rise of AI to speed time-to-value.

AI is taking what used to be the hardest parts of DEX and making them much easier:

• No need to sift through vast quantities of data—AI is now capable of detecting anomalies in your data set and surfacing its likely root cause.
• No more searching for the right fix—AI serves up recommendations that are most likely to fix the problem.
• No more building everything from scratch—years of DEX experience have produced ready-to-run automations for the most common IT challenges.

I remember a conversation with an early DEX leader who told me, “we are the pioneers in this space, and we’re learning as we go. We’re not trying to serve up the Gordon Ramsey Dish of the Year of digital experience. We’re just trying to serve some palatable hamburgers.”

Lucky for SMB customers, much of the groundwork for DEX is already in place, so you can go right ahead and start serving a pretty tasty digital experience burger right away.

Why SMBs can’t afford to wait on AI and DEX

We live in a hypercompetitive world, and AI is only raising the bar. For SMBs, keeping pace with larger, better-resourced competitors has never been more challenging. According to our TeamViewer AI Opportunity Report, 97% of respondents agree there are serious consequences for organizations that fail to embrace AI.

When asked what those consequences are, the answers are clear:

1. Falling behind the competition.
2. Higher costs due to lack of automation.
3. Inefficient processes and systems that slow everything down.

And the impact is even more pronounced in the SMB market. While 21% of enterprise respondents see higher costs from lack of automation as a serious risk, that number jumps to 30% for SMBs. In other words: smaller organizations feel the pain of inefficiency more acutely because they don’t have the resources to absorb it.

The message is simple. Without innovation in AI, SMBs risk falling behind. But as we discussed, AI is making DEX easier to implement than ever before. With automation, recommendations, and ready-to-use insights built in, SMBs now have the opportunity to leap forward and close the experience gap with their enterprise peers.

Customer impact: Early wins with DEX Essentials