The Workplace Experience category is official. We’ve been here the whole time

Pete Schmied, CEO, Appspace

The Workplace Experience category recently got its first Gartner Magic Quadrant™ – which named Appspace a Leader. But the decision that got us here was made years ago, when we looked at how companies were running their workplace experience and decided the fragmented model was fundamentally broken.

Internal comms in one tool. Space reservation in another. Digital signage in a third. Visitor management somewhere else entirely. Nobody owning how it all worked together. We thought that was wrong, so we built one connected platform instead.

In my opinion, Gartner just validated the bet we made. 

But here’s what I actually want to talk about — not the recognition, but why a connected workplace experience is more urgent now than it’s ever been. Because what we’re seeing across the market right now is what we’re calling the experience reset. And most organizations are behind on it.

The experience reset

Most organizations are cobbling together their version of a workplace experience. They have the tools. The intranet delivers internal communications. The space reservation tool books desks. The signage displays content. Each one doing its job. In theory.

But having the tools isn’t the same as having a connected experience. And that gap — between what organizations have built and what employees actually experience — is widening. Not because companies made bad decisions. Because the world changed faster than the tools did.

Think about how you find information outside of work. You don’t navigate anymore. You expect the answer — instantly, in context, shaped by what you’re actually trying to do. These days, it’s usually some form of AI that’s doing the work for you. 

That behavioral shift doesn’t stay outside the workplace. A new generation has entered the workforce with exactly those expectations. If technology makes them dig, click around, or piece things together themselves, it already feels broken. With AI driving the bus, the gap between what people expect and what most workplace tools deliver becomes impossible to ignore.

The experience reset is an acknowledgment that the old model is breaking and a new one is forming. It’s not about optimization — not about refining what you have. It’s a step-change. Letting go of systems, workflows, and UX patterns built for a previous era, and rebuilding around how work actually operates now.

We published our 2026 workplace experience trends & insights report  earlier this year, where we surveyed 1,000 employees, in the US and UK. The numbers make the cost of the old model impossible to ignore.

72% of employees feel out of the loop on key workplace updates. 81% say their organization lacks consistency across communication channels. 55% say their organization struggles to connect the physical and digital workplace. 97% say missing key information negatively impacts their work. 67% say disconnected systems and poor communication put organizational success at risk.

These aren’t outliers. They’re the norm. And they’re the predictable outcome of systems that were never designed to connect.

But here’s the other side of those numbers. When organizations get the experience right:

91% are more engaged and motivated. 94% feel more confident in their role. 91% feel more aligned with organizational goals.

That’s a fundamentally different organization. 

The question worth asking when you evaluate any platform in this space isn’t “do you have all the products on the list.” It’s “are those products designed to work together?”

What this Gartner recognition signals

Gartner named Appspace a Leader — positioned at the top of the quadrant.

I’ll be honest about what that means to me. It’s not the ranking. It’s the signal. The companies we work with — 180+ of the Fortune 500 — have been telling us for years that the old model is broken. Now there’s an analyst framework that confirms it.

But here’s what I’d add — because Gartner’s category is a starting point, not the full picture.

Space management is where the category is centered. And that’s the right place to start. But Appspace has always believed that space without communication is still fragmented. Communication without space context is still incomplete. The full experience — comms, signage, space, visitor management, AI orchestration — has to work as one thing. That’s what we built toward. And that’s the distinction that matters most in practice.

What to watch for as the market moves

Gartner naming this category will accelerate things for sure, and that’s mostly good. But it will also create noise.

You’ll see vendors reposition quickly. Feature lists that suddenly include “coordination” or “orchestration”.  The category language without the philosophy behind it.

The question I’d ask is about intent

Was this platform built to unify the workplace experience?

A platform built with that goal in mind asks: how does information flow between spaces, systems, and people? How does what happens in one part of the experience inform what happens in another? Does its AI act on context or just surface content?

You won’t always be able to tell the difference in a demo. A demo won’t tell you whether a platform was built to unify the experience or assembled to BS you into saying yes. What tells you is what happens in practice, like when an employee moves between spaces and the experience needs to follow them. Or when a visitor arrives and three systems need to talk to each other. Or when AI needs context that lives somewhere else in the platform.

In a fragmented stack, nobody owns the problem. In a coordinated platform, there’s one place to look.

Why this is just the beginning

The recognition matters. But it’s not the real story. 

Most organizations are further behind on this than they realize.

For the organizations that have already made the shift — the ones who trusted us before the category had a report — you were right. The bet was right. And the work you put into making the shift — the change management, the internal selling, the patience — that was the harder part. We just built the platform.

For the organizations still evaluating: the category is real, the research is here, and the gap between where most workplaces are and where they should be is measurable.

The experience reset is happening. The only question is how far behind you are, and what you’re going to do about it.

→ Download the first-ever Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Workplace Experience Applications