2026 Predictions from Andrew Hewitt, TeamViewer’s DEX expert

The Digital Employee Experience (DEX) market will see a massive proliferation of AI agents in 2026, marking a fundamental shift from AI that simply provides insights to AI that actually executes actions. Unlike current AI capabilities that summarize data and generate recommendations, these agents will have specific tasks to execute independently, that learn from their actions and adapt their approach over time. Initially, these agents will operate within individual vendor platforms - creating surveys, building automations and surfacing technical issues that employees never report. To take it a step further, by late 2026 and into 2027, we'll see real change as agents start interacting with other agents outside of the vendor ecosystem, enabling truly comprehensive employee experience management.

Organizations should begin identifying use cases where AI agents can address the "silent sufferers" - the employees living with technology issues that service desks can't solve. They should start with internally-focused agents that can surface unreported IT issues and recommend - and eventually execute - fixes. Once that's done, they should then start preparing infrastructure for cross-platform agent collaboration as the technology matures.