Part three of Andrew’s DEX Decoded series explores how agentic AI shifts digital employee experience (DEX) from reactive to autonomous.
The age of AI is here, and CIOs can no longer afford to treat it as optional. In fact, according to our TeamViewer AI Opportunity Report, 97% of executives believe there will be serious consequences for not embracing AI.
Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of attending Gartner’s IT Symposium/Xpo in Gold Coast, Australia. It probably comes as no surprise, but AI was the top focus at this conference of CIOs. What stood out most to me, though, was the role that AI will play in enabling what Gartner calls autonomous business, defined as:
A strategy that uses self-improving, adaptable technology to make decisions, take action, and create new value.
According to Gartner, autonomous business is underpinned by three major shifts: augmented workforce, auto-adapting products, and autonomous operations.
Thinking about the future of the DEX market, it’s clear that DEX will play an increasingly vital role in enabling autonomous business, specifically through autonomous operations.
While platforms like TeamViewer already play a pivotal role in keeping employees productive through AI, the arrival of agentic AI—AI that acts with autonomy—represents a step change in what DEX can deliver. We’re no longer just talking about how DEX can keep employees productive, but rather how DEX can support the transition from digital business to autonomous business with agentic DEX capabilities.
AI is not new in DEX. Most current platforms already use at least some machine learning and generative AI capabilities to make IT teams more effective and employees more productive. While adoption of these capabilities is still immature in the market today, we commonly see AI use cases centered around:
While these capabilities are already making an impact in the DEX market, they still depend on humans to interpret and act on the information. The real shift comes when AI stops requiring human assistance and starts to work more autonomously.
AI is quickly leveling the playing field for practitioners, where less technical admins can use AI to perform at the level of a more experienced technician. The risks of not adopting AI capabilities within DEX will be high. According to our TeamViewer AI Opportunity report, there will be five major consequences of not embracing AI adoption:
These numbers are not abstract. They directly map to the pain points DEX platforms are designed to solve. Standing still means not just falling behind competitors but actively eroding employee trust and organizational resilience.
So, what comes after anomaly detection, root cause recommendations, and generative automations? The answer is agentic AI. Agentic AI shifts the focus from knowing to acting. It’s not just about generating text, images, and answers but about letting AI take the reins and execute ever-more-complex workflows.
Agentic AI will transform DEX in three stages:
Initially, AI will handle simple, repetitive tasks for individual employees. Imagine an AI agent focused on increasing patch success rates by ensuring endpoint management tools are working correctly, devices have enough disk space to install the patch, and all devices with known vulnerabilities have associated patches. AI agents will evaluate these conditions and execute the patch with human oversight.
Over time, multiple agents will collaborate to handle more complex workflows. For example, one agent might monitor sentiment, another diagnose anomalies, and a third coordinate remediation—all working together without human interference. In this case, they would all operate within a single platform, like TeamViewer DEX.
Ultimately, we will see ecosystems of agents operating across domains, integrating data from HR, security, collaboration, and IT systems to optimize the employee experience holistically. These agents won’t just fix problems; they’ll anticipate them, personalize experiences, and continuously improve digital environments. For example, imagine a fleet of AI agents from multiple vendors working together to build, measure, and improve experience level agreements (XLAs).
This is the logical evolution of DEX: from reactive monitoring to proactive to autonomous.
At Gold Coast, Gartner laid out a useful framework for how to think about the impact of AI. While these questions could apply to AI generally, I’ll take some time to examine how they will impact the DEX market specifically:
AI will surface the insights IT needs automatically, removing the burden of parsing endless dashboards or raw telemetry data. You won’t need to know what version of a driver is associated with good performance. AI will do that for you. AI in DEX will mean you won’t need to know platform-specific technical skills (e.g., scripts). Instead, you’ll have to know how to orchestrate AI capabilities across multiple operating systems.
From a people perspective, deep technical level three (L3) IT support skills and first-line level one (L1) skills will increasingly be handled by AI, so IT leaders will no longer need as many of these types of roles. However, that does not mean AI will eliminate these roles. Instead, these roles will transform to focus on AI orchestration or employee enablement. You’re no longer paying for deep technical Windows admin skills. You’re paying for the ability to manage AI agents at scale across the whole digital workplace.
The heart of agentic AI is automation. From survey creation to root cause analysis to cross-domain orchestration, tasks that once consumed IT bandwidth will happen in the background. Some likely contenders for complete agentic orchestration are problem management, employee onboarding, patch management, persona creation and optimization, and incident management.
This reframing is essential for DEX leaders. AI’s value isn’t just in faster resolution times; it’s in eliminating entire cost categories, leaving IT leaders much more room to focus on AI enablement in their workforce.
Amid all the technology, it’s easy to forget that DEX is fundamentally about people. The human element cannot be ignored:
Agentic AI will only succeed if it improves the employee experience, not undermines it. That means putting humans at the center of design, governance, and communication strategies.
The DEX market is at a turning point. AI already delivers value today through anomaly detection, sentiment analysis, and generative AI. But the future is agentic—where AI doesn’t just support IT, but manages, optimizes, and personalizes every interaction.
Standing still is not an option. Leaders who fail to adopt AI risk higher costs, weaker security, inefficiency, and frustrated employees. Those who embrace agentic AI will gain faster time to value, richer insights, autonomous operations, and tailored employee experiences that drive satisfaction and productivity.
The age of AI is here. For DEX, the opportunity is clear: harness agentic AI to transform how employees work, connect, and thrive.
Stay tuned for my next blog post, which covers why DEX and good security don’t have to be at odds.
Vice-President Strategic Technology at TeamViewer
—
Andrew Hewitt is VP Strategic Technology at TeamViewer and former Forrester Analyst. An industry veteran, he brings over a decade of experience in digital workplace and DEX thought leadership, market research, CIO consulting, and competitive intelligence to his role.
