Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Simon Townsend, SVP of Marketing & Office of the CTO, ControlUp
Nurturing employees by giving them all the digital tools they need to be productive is a must in our global workforce environment but when does support turn to spending overruns? In 2026 CFOs and executive teams will be taking a hard look at SaaS and other applications to try to reduce waste and redundancy. They will be directing efforts to improve employee sentiment and engagement, using digital employee experience (DEX) tools to chart their path. DEX itself will evolve from IT-centric roles to wider responsibility at the C-suite level.
The goal will be a healthy balance between satisfying workforce needs and financial stability to weather the next tech storm. Also, CFOs will need to finish the last lap of Windows 11 migration as extended support will become another budget drain.
CFOs Want to Stop the SaaS Runaway Train
The check for CFOs is coming due for unused SaaS and non-SaaS applications. In an often-quoted report, Gartner estimated 25% of SaaS spending is wasted, due to underutilization and redundant tools. An estimated 40% of overall application spend goes unused. As enterprises need to reallocate budget to AI, GPU services security, and other initiatives they will be looking to cut down on waste. Companies with over 1,000 employees waste approximately $21 million annually on unused licenses.
Shadow IT, the growing practice of employees purchasing rogue licenses, is a main waste culprit and a contributor to higher security risk. To lower risk enterprises are turning to DEX solutions to identify costly non-used and underused apps and to find potential threats. DEX monitoring can flag unsecured Shadow IT apps, significantly lower risk, and prevent a privacy data breach. Since Shadow IT practitioners may also use unsecured devices, identifying these apps will also thwart the proliferation of a potential threat across more than one channel. A DEX platform with SaaS awareness can show who is accessing which apps, from which devices, and what the technical risk profile of those devices looks like.
DEX tools can also drill down to provide a better snapshot of application use, recording app launch counts, session length and personas via SaaS, browsers, or desktops. The combined data will ferret out unused and underutilized apps as well as redundant tools, giving CFOs and teams better visibility into wasted spend.
Your Employees Are Breaking Up With IT
IT staff are getting pulled into AI app operations, diverting time from other tasks including help desk response. As a result, employees, frustrated with help desk delays, are fixing or trying to fix problems at their desktop themselves. In 2026 more employees will give up on waiting for help desk support and take a DIY approach to slow logons, VDI session glitches or SaaS apps that stop performing at the inconvenient hour of 11PM.
Besides the immediate loss of productivity, the shadow DIY approach creates security risks. An employee might also use an unsecured personal laptop as a workaround, install a rogue browser extension, or use a chatbot to discuss sensitive content.
A solution is proactive monitoring and automated remediation via DEX to fix issues before an employee thinks to open a ticket, and frustration adds up. DEX tools can monitor logons, app crashes, battery health, CPU spikes, and SaaS errors in real time and remediate around-the-clock, a benefit for remote workers with varying schedules.
Employee Sentiment is the Hidden Dagger in Company Success
In 2026 employee sentiment and engagement roles will continue to move from HR to the boardroom, with new job titles, as companies see more clearly the ratio between employee happiness and ROI/revenue. DEX will emerge as a central asset, prompting new titles like Chief DEX Officer to oversee DEX initiatives and Proactive Analyst to monitor metrics and sentiment and address issues.
“Digital employee experience (DEX) is emerging as a key function for enterprises navigating hybrid work and increasing end-user digital complexity,” says Phil Hochmuth, program VP, Endpoint Management and Enterprise Mobility at IDC. “By combining endpoint telemetry, application analytics, sentiment data, and automation, DEX can help IT operations teams proactively manage and optimize employees’ digital work environments.”
The timing is certainly right as remote work has not translated to employee happiness. Gallup’s 2025 State of the Global Workplace report notes employee engagement fell from 23% to 21% last year, only the second decline in the past 12 years. Harder hit were the digital natives, young under-35 managers whose engagement dropped five points.
These troubling statistics are driving more interest in DEX as businesses realize the only experience many digital natives have had is a remote, digital one. And the reality is, all remote workforce employees are now dependent on positive DEX for a productive work life.
Measuring employee sentiment must be an ongoing practice and can be accomplished via tools embedded in a DEX solution. Using a sentiment dashboard, DEX leaders can view collected data ranging from basic employee satisfaction with work tools to hard data on crash frequency, login durations, SaaS timeouts, and device health for the same employees.
Businesses who elevate DEX as integral to employee engagement will benefit from increased employee trust that their company is truly supporting them. Gallup notes the significant economic benefit. “If the world’s workplace was fully engaged, US $9.6 trillion in productivity could be added to the global economy, the equivalent of 9% in global GDP.”
Windows 10 Becomes a Very Expensive Date
Those businesses who are still holdouts in switching to Windows 11 will face hefty bills in 2026. Microsoft formally ended support for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, and introduced Extended Security Updates (ESU) for organizations that did not complete their migration. ESU costs are expected to rise each year and must be paid cumulatively if an organization joins late. For a company with tens of thousands of endpoints, the bill will be punishing.
This economic pressure will encourage more strategic device purchasing decisions. Instead of buying one high end laptop configuration for everyone and replacing it every three or four years, CFOs and IT teams will use DEX telemetry data to fine tune hardware buying. The data will provide usage and device data and enable buyers to group employees into personas. Then they can buy devices according to task, power, frontline, or mobile users. To support sustainability, DEX data like battery health, thermals, memory pressure, and storage saturation will also help decide whether to replace a battery, a device, or an entire class of endpoints.
Wiser Spending in 2026
Budgets are getting tighter. Employees aren’t getting happier. Businesses face 2026 knowing they need to throttle back on application overspend and more precisely manage their employee’s digital experience. Using DEX, they can start to reverse negative trends in a global workforce in which a startling 79% are less than engaged.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Simon Townsend is a prominent end user computing technology evangelist, marketer and thought leader. As Senior Vice President of Marketing and Office of the CTO, he leads the company’s marketing strategy and team of digital, field, channel and product marketers and technical experts, worldwide. He joins ControlUp from IGEL where he served as Field CTO for EMEA and Chief Marketing Officer, overseeing field, digital and product marketing functions. With more than 20 years of experience in the end-user computing market, Townsend has held leadership positions in marketing, product marketing, product management and global systems engineering for several enterprise software companies including Ivanti, AppSense, Servo and Westcon UK.
