Business executives are dramatically underestimating the digital complexity of their enterprises' application landscapes, posing a significant challenge for organizations seeking to effectively optimize their technology investments.
According to WalkMe's recently released State of Digital Adoption research report, digital inefficiencies cost large enterprises over $104 million alone in 2024, due to underutilized technology and productivity challenges.
With AI adoption a hot-button issue for organizations worldwide, the report—while outlining seven digital adoption best practices and their business impacts—focused on the readiness gap between AI investment and business result, revealing a disconnect between enterprise ambitions and adoption trends.
Part of the problem, the report indicates, is that executives lack visibility into what applications are being used within their businesses. While executives estimate employees at their organizations use an average of 37 applications, the average large enterprise actually has around 625 applications in use, representing a staggering 1,600 percent visibility gap.
The disconnect is particularly profound for organizations investing in AI initiatives. "While 79 percent of executives express confidence in achieving AI transformation goals, only 28 percent of employees feel adequately trained, and just 25 percent can use AI to work more efficiently," wrote Dan Adika, CEO and Co-Founder of WalkMe, in an announcement of the research results for SAP.
"Enterprises now face a choice: continue accumulating transformation debt and lag behind the competition, or embrace digital adoption as the bridge to AI-powered success." — Dan Adika, CEO and Co-Founder of WalkMe
"While digital transformation leaders generated $9 trillion in shareholder value from 2018 to 2023, others missed $5 trillion in potential gains," Adika added. "Enterprises now face a choice: continue accumulating transformation debt and lag behind the competition, or embrace digital adoption as the bridge to AI-powered success."
Digital Adoption Enables Business Impact in SAP Ecosystem
This analysis of digital adoption challenges comes at a significant time for the SAP community, particularly given SAP’s $1.5 billion acquisition of WalkMe. A digital adoption platform provider, WalkMe focuses on optimizing workflows by monitoring applications and providing users with suggestions to help them navigate ERP complexity.
With its acquisition of WalkMe, SAP sought to bolster its business transformation offerings, complementing the transformation suite of SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX to drive adoption and continuous value realization for SAP customers embarking on transformation journeys.
“Applications, processes, data, and people are the four key elements of a successful business transformation," stated SAP CEO Christian Klein in a press release at the time. "By acquiring WalkMe, we are doubling down on the support we provide our end users, helping them to quickly adopt new solutions and features to get the maximum value out of their IT investments.”
The findings in WalkMe's research report underscore the importance of incorporating digital-adoption best practices into digital transformation efforts. Particularly with large enterprises investing twice as much in AI last year as they did in 2023, failing to incorporate digital-adoption strategies can come at an increasingly steep financial cost.
According to the report, organizations that do not implement adoption best practices achieve only a 22 percent return on investment (ROI) on digital-transformation investments, a figure that nearly triples to 64 percent with just one best practice implemented and reaches 85 percent ROI for organizations implementing three or more practices.
The human cost of poor digital adoption is similarly substantial, with employees estimating that they waste an average of 36 working days a year while struggling with technology issues. Furthermore, 64 percent of employees stated they need to use multiple applications to perform their jobs. The report refers to this as a “productivity paradox,” wherein investments in digital tools fail to translate into productivity gains.
The contrast between elite adopters and typical organizations is particularly stark. The 7 percent of enterprises classified as “elite digital adopters” by WalkMe's research report estimate that 90 percent of employees use AI at work, compared to 63 percent at other organizations. Executives at these high-performing companies are also more than twice as likely to incorporate AI assistants into employee workflows.
According to the report, organizations are increasing their investments in adoption expertise. Currently, 63 percent of enterprises maintain centers of excellence for digital adoption staffed by six or more people, while this percentage is projected to rise to 73 percent by 2025. Over 16,000 individuals listed digital adoption expertise on LinkedIn at the time of the report's publication, while 80 percent were either already using or planning to use generative AI to enhance software adoption in their organizations.
WalkMe Results Align With SAP's Strategic Rationale
Looking ahead, the report's findings reflect a growing maturity in how businesses approach AI, as they move beyond early experiments toward methodical implementation strategies. Instead of pursuing the latest features, companies and their staff will focus more on building strong foundations — better security protocols, streamlined efficiency, and robust management systems.
The report advises companies seeking better digital adoption results to balance ambitious AI goals and concrete implementation plans, tackle the disconnect between what leaders see of their company's technology investments and what employees experience navigating complex workflows, and make serious investments in training so employees can properly use the tools they’re given.
Within the SAP ecosystem, these findings align with the strategic rationale behind the WalkMe acquisition. Dr. Walter Sun, Global Head of Artificial Intelligence at SAP,recently told ASUG that WalkMe completes SAP’s business transformation management portfolio by adding “a strong people component” to the existing process, applications, and data dimensions already covered by other areas of its business-transformation suite.
"Having SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, SAP Business Technology Platform, and now WalkMe working together, we can help our customers perform a digital transformation journey even faster and more effectively," Sun explained.
"Of course, WalkMe will help to enhance the productivity of our digital AI assistant," he added. "It can overlay web, mobile, and desktop apps, including SAP and non-SAP systems, without integrating online software. By combining WalkMe’s adoption capabilities with SAP’s Joule copilot, SAP will be able to offer better AI assistance in the user experience."
WalkMe’s adoption capabilities will enhance productivity by providing on-screen guidance and automation features that help Joule's users to navigate complex digital processes with simplified workflows, addressing precisely the kind of visibility gaps highlighted in this report.
For more, read Adika's assessment of the WalkMe report findings, and dive into the full report here.