It is well-known that the convergence of a family of smooth functions does not imply the convergence of its gradients. In this work, we show that if the family is definable in an o-minimal structure (for instance semialgebraic, subanalytic, or any composition of the previous with exp, log), then the gradient’s limit is a conservative set-valued field in the sense introduced by Bolte and Pauwels. Immediate implications of this result on convergence guarantees of smoothing methods are discussed. Finally, a more general result is established, where the functions in the original family might be merely Lipschitz continuous, vector-valued and the gradients are replaced by their Clarke’s Jacobians or an arbitrary definable conservative mapping.