The background of persuasive technologies is the traditional interpersonal persuasion, studied for over two thousand years in rethoric, philosophy, and more recently in psychology. This last discipline offers many theories and models to understand more precisely the processes that influence human behaviors. These theories show in particular that persuasive situations are complex, varied, with many influence factors. Therefore, we propose the notion of adaptive persuasive technologies, i.e. technologies able to adapt their persuasive strategies to the user context. To design such products and services, we propose a model of the persuasive context, i.e. of all the constraints that influence a user’s targeted behavior at a given time. Each constraint in the persuasive context is at the same time an adaptation criterion and an action leverage for the adaptive persuasive technology.