You can use employee experience (EX) management platforms to improve employee engagement, create better customer experiences (CX), and increase employee retention. But to realize these benefits, you’ll first have to select from a diverse set of vendors that vary by size, type of offering, geography, and use case differentiation. Experience professionals and leaders should use this report to understand the value they can expect from an employee experience management platform vendor, learn how vendors differ, and investigate options based on size and market focus.

This report introduces Forrester’s global Employee Experience Index (EX Index™), a key measure that describes the EX impact on a company’s efforts to improve its Total Experience Score. The EX Index evaluates employee sentiment about how organizations empower, enable, and inspire workers, leading to increased retention, effectiveness, and innovation readiness. Each organization is categorized relative to its global industry peers to capture the impact that EX has on the organization’s ability to reach its goals related to brand experience (BX) and customer experience (CX). Organizations are either helped or hurt by their EX as they work to grow with both noncustomers and customers.

Companies invest billions annually in customer, brand, and employee experience initiatives yet treat them as fundamentally separate domains with different owners, budgets, and measures of success. The result is a blind spot: No cross-company dataset has existed to show how employee experience factors link to customer satisfaction and brand experience outcomes, leaving leaders unable to make a credible business case for investing in linking them. Forrester’s Employee Experience Index (EX Index™) research brings just this capacity to Forrester’s total experience methodology; the findings enhance our understanding of what it takes to deliver sustainable customer and brand excellence.

With the widespread adoption of AI agents on the horizon, employees will soon have coworkers whose capabilities equal or exceed their own. This shift requires enterprises to rethink how roles will change and what new skills employees will need to succeed. Attend this peer discussion to explore the five agent experience (AX) requirements that will evolve as AI agents become more autonomous. This conversation, hosted by Craig Le Clair, VP and principal analyst, and David Brodeur-Johnson, principal analyst, will include open discussion with participants, so please bring your questions and experiences to share with the group. Questions for discussion:How do we see the role of AI agents evolving? Could they eventually sit at the center of workflows and take on the role humans currently play as primary orchestrators? What is the progression or maturity path for AI agents, and what signals might help us understand where they’re headed? What approaches can we share for shaping a workforce skills roadmap? What might this look like, specifically for customer service and application development teams? Peer discussions are available exclusively to Forrester Decisions VIP Leaders and Leader license holders for their own participation.

GenAI presents powerful new opportunities for understanding employee experience (EX) inside of your organization. Deriving EX insights from the “digital exhaust” of employees’ daily work is now within reach. Forrester’s model combines existing tools with cutting-edge neurolinguistic processing capabilities and genAI using a privacy-by-design approach that protects employees’ identities while unlocking deeper insights into their sentiments, emotions, and experiences.Join David Brodeur-Johnson and James McQuivey, PhD for a conversation about what deep listening is, what it can do, and how to make it a reality for your organization. The results will transform leadership and change management practices through better visibility and understanding.Key takeaways: Learn what deep listening is and how it works. Explore the kinds of insights that deep listening can offer.Learn about the deep listening technology stack.Target audience level: intermediate and advanced

Firms are sitting on a wealth of data that they could use wisely to improve employee engagement and business outcomes, but they have been prohibited from deriving insight from this data because it has been out of the reach of today’s technology. That’s about to change, enabling a new model for deriving employee-experience insights that Forrester calls deep listening. No vendors are shipping a complete capability yet, so firms that wish to engage in deep listening need to build their own. Read this report to understand the “privacy by design” approach to establishing the processes and technology stack for preparing for deep listening now.

GenAI presents powerful new opportunities for understanding employee experience (EX) inside of your organization. Deriving EX insights from the “digital exhaust” of employees’ daily work is now within easy reach. Forrester’s model combines existing tools with cutting-edge neurolinguistic processing capabilities and genAI using a “privacy by design” approach that protects employees’ identities while unlocking deeper insights into their sentiments, emotions, and potentially how their various experiences have led to how they’re feeling. The results will transform leadership and change management practices for the better but only if “privacy by design” protections are engineered in from the start.

With the widespread adoption of AI agents on the horizon, employees will soon have coworkers whose capabilities equal or exceed their own. This shift requires enterprises to rethink how roles will change and what new skills employees will need to succeed. This report defines five agent experience (AX) requirements that will evolve as AI agents become more autonomous.

In 2025, we encouraged leaders to soar high above the EX winter from the year before, but external events have interceded. AI hype and destabilizing politics across the globe have cast a long shadow on your path to the future of work. Disruption is no longer episodic; it’s ambient. Many firms are so focused on chasing AI-fueled efficiencies that they haven’t determined what AI can actually offer, causing them to rehire terminated roles. Meanwhile, some employers genuinely want to offer innovative solutions to problems such as affordable housing or access to healthcare, but their efforts will fall flat if they miss the glaring opportunity to navigate uncertainty by tapping their employees’ creativity and experience.

After a decade of gains, US employee engagement fell significantly after the pandemic as organizational changes, layoffs, and return-to-office mandates led many to feel burned out. EX leaders face the hard work of reversing this trend. The good news is that new solutions exist to slash burnout and elevate engagement. It matters because engaged employees drive competitive advantage, especially through better customer experience. This report defines and deconstructs employee burnout and offers insights on how to begin addressing burnout at your organization.