If the key to winning the current AI arms race is to process and summarize the largest volume of information available to mankind in the quickest manner possible, UKG begs to differ.
At its recent Aspire user conference attended by 5,000+ professionals across HR, Pay, operations and the C-suite in Las Vegas, the No. 1 vendor in workforce management applications responded to the seismic changes in computing not by following the whims of AI modelers or an onslaught of digital agents, but rather sticking to its core strengths in frontline employee data after amassing billions of datapoints across people, work, and culture each year for nearly half a century – what UKG calls the world’s largest collection of its type.
At the same time, UKG is streamlining its operations in order to move at AI speed safely and responsibly because the stakes are too high that failure in its stewardship could have serious ramifications to tens of millions of frontline workers and their wellbeing.
Following her appointment to lead the company in mid-2024, CEO Jennifer Morgan said the most effective way to benefit employers large and small as well as their frontline workers is to harness the data already at hand from their Core HR, payroll and workforce management systems, buttressing them with its Workforce Operating Platform.
The UKG Workforce Operating Platform represents a rich knowledge center that has been aggregating labor and wage data for decades and is now capable of making sense of up-to-the-moment shifts in recruiting, retention and retirement for ad-hoc scheduling and long-term planning and budgeting.
“This is the deeper and richer (insight) that you want, imagine having this conversation with your CFOs and Line of Business leaders,” Morgan said, “The possibility is truly endless.’’
Morgan added that the real beneficiaries will be the frontline workers and their supervisors since they are going to be empowered to leverage the knowledge to help each other when life events intrude upon at any given time or if they want to bid for additional shifts in order to earn more. “Motivating the workforce with intelligence will help any organization become more resilient and achieve growth,’’ she said.
Rachel Barger, president of GTM at UKG, said since the data assets from its Workforce Operating Platform are unified and standardized, companies can improve execution of their business processes with the right level of resource support, thus “making work work better for all.’’
At the core of its new AI strategy is the upcoming UKG Workforce Intelligence Hub, a readily available repository of work-related information and insights that are cumulative, real-time and tuned to the needs of specific industries and organizations.
With revenues of nearly $5 billion in its latest fiscal year, the size of UKG customer data sets is breathtaking. Relying on UKG to manage their employees every day, more than 80,000 organizations around the world in any given year run its HR, Payroll and Workforce Management applications to post 10 billion punches and 12 billion schedules, more than $1 trillion in payroll runs and engage with over 750 million job applicants.
In addition to UKG Workforce Intelligence Hub slated to be released in 2026, the three-day event ushered in a slew of new products including UKG Beacon, an employee recognition and culture building offering through its recent acquisition of Mo; UKG Rapid Hire, which is based on the acquisition of Chattr and accelerates the high volume frontline hiring process to just a couple of days, and Dynamic Labor Management, which helps organizations react to customer demand fluctuations in real-time, providing suggestions for how to effective redeploy staff.
The vendor also unveiled the UKG Frontline Worker Network, an AI-led offering that anticipates the needs of employees based on various work information stored within UKG to proactively recommends services and support through its digital agent Bryte AI. The goal is to proactively push out delivery of employee services like earned wage access, health and wellness program support, as well as daily essentials like transportation and backup childcare options, all coming from an assembly of third-party providers including Chime, TurboTax and OnePay.
Culture of Measurement
These developments capped an 18-month sprint for Morgan, a former CEO from SAP and portfolio executive at the Private Equity Firm Blackstone.
When asked what constitutes the new culture of UKG, Morgan’s approach is akin to keeping a regimented schedule of intense training, refueling and resting with discipline worthy of an Olympic gold medalist.
Morgan said her priorities over the past year revolved around a company organization that delegates complete P&L responsibility to product general managers in charge of Core HR, Payroll, Workforce Management, AI, Global Payroll, UKG Ready for SMBs and other operating units. They look after everything from release milestones to customer successes, getting themselves and their teams trained and accustomed to being fully accountable.
“You can’t move fast if you are working with a bunch of silos,” Morgan said. “You need people who believe in one set of better empowerment (for the team) and it goes down to levels 2 and 3 that are equally accountable,’’ Morgan said.
Refueling means Morgan has been staffing up since mid-2024 with top industry executives rounding out her leadership team, with the culmination of recent additions like Jim Joudrey, who became its chief technology officer after years of heading the digital operations of Amazon Prime.
In addition to completing recent deals like Mo and Chattr, as well as Shiftboard to enhance scheduling for highly regulated industries in June, Arlen Shenkman, the new CFO of UKG, said another major difference is that the vendor has left its risk-adverse culture behind by becoming more entrepreneurial. “From the top down, UKG employees are encouraged to take risks. That’s something not traditionally done,’’ he said.
Case in point is the launch of UKG Ventures, a fund with direct investment in complementary startups including the first three entities – Financial Wellness Labs, Intermezzo.ai and Acadian Ventures. In contrast, UKG Labs, its incubator program, is designed to connect pre-seed and seed stage startups with its customers and product experts for mentorship and co-innovation, not direct financial investment.
Jay Dettling, the new Chief Partner Officer of UKG, said the vendor is now making increased investment in its ecosystem of systems integrators, ISV partners and service providers like benefit brokers, with the goal of generating hundreds of millions of dollars in new parter-influenced revenues for fiscal 2026 and the long-term vision of doubling UKG’s size with partners accounting for as much as half of its sales, compared with 29% at the present.
Finally, Morgan is allowing extra time for reflections on the new culture of measurement at UKG by focusing on customer satisfaction, a metric that cannot be quickly established and sustained until it’s tracked meticulously over an extended period.
Bob DelPointe, executive vice president of UKG and its Chief Customer Experience Officer, said recent trends point to significantly increased customer satisfaction levels, topping the milestone that it reached nearly five years earlier. With more than 6,000 professionals in its customer success and support operations, DelPointe attributes the improved performance to more than a year of overhauling its structure including an extensive use of AI agents to handle support sessions that make smart use of conversational UI that is natural, accurate and reliable.
Coincidentally, UKG is also moving its next Aspire user conference to May 2027 at the Venetian Resort, a departure from its normal November date and Mandalay Bay venue. In addition to upleveling the venue, UKG is taking the opportunity to move away from the busy Fall conference season, a time when HR professionals are most focused on their people.
Reactions from customers to the new and improved UKG have been positive. A host of marquee customers such as Google, Marriott, Primark and Unify reported successful deployment of their new UKG solutions for Core HR, Pay and Workforce Management with some achieving 90% adoption among their employees for mobile use of the systems and others citing zero payroll glitches after going live on UKG Pro Payroll in an implementation that was smooth and under budget.
A US healthcare organization goes further by detailing its ability to generate $2.8 million in savings after implementing UKG Pro Workforce Management, ending past practices of unnecessary overtime and wasteful spending. To boost morale, the hospital intends to issue employee discretionary bonuses with the savings incurred.
Other attendees including a club operator are generally pleased with the customer support progress that UKG has made despite running into initial integration challenges with their Core HR and workforce management systems, an issue that UKG People Fabric is addressing. According to the HR executive, the upside is that UKG has outperformed compared with other software providers that the club operator has been relying on.
Looking ahead, one public sector customer said she is evaluating UKG’s AI capabilities for speeding up the payroll processes. As the county government prepares to migrate from Telestaff to UKG Pro Workforce Management, the payroll supervisor said there is a general sense of wariness among its key stakeholders on what AI is capable of. “People are scared of AI,’’ she said, adding that one of her concerns has to do with ensuring the underlying datasets are robust enough to handle some of their advanced reporting needs.
With little or no margin for errors when doing a payroll run and so much at stake, the high hopes and trepidation reinforce the opportunities and challenges facing UKG as it maneuvers its way through the AI clutters by safeguarding that the outcome can be traced and validated.
Corey Spencer, GVP and General Manager of AI at UKG, said the vendor is addressing such concerns by placing trust open and transparent from the Bryte Confidence Score that optimizes visibility into how AI recommendations are being derived.
Spencer said among the 20 early adopters of Workforce Intelligence Hub, ParkOhio, a supply chain logistics and manufacturing company, is able to use the Insights Edition to comb through massive amounts of disparate data sources and create a working model to draw the connection between units produced and transacted per dollar of labor spend, making the insights available to different executives with their existing business intelligence tools and saving them considerable time and effort.
Instead of asking customers to turn to different systems for Core HR, Pay, Workforce Management and third-party add-ons, Spencer said the transformative power of AI lies in aggregating and making the most of their own data within their assigned tenancy safely, securely and responsibly in ways that they could not have done before.
“They are using the data in new and creative ways by building their own agents and their own (AI) systems and operationalize throughout the company,’’ Spencer said. “The value of the data is inherently clear.’’
As with any Olympian, the ultimate goal is not just to win the race but also set a world record. Unlike many AI companies that have lofty goals but without executable plans, UKG is banking on its intensive training regimen, considerable data assets and perhaps a little break from time to time to assess the HR landscape before reloading in order to set the new benchmark for workforce intelligence, or even excellence.
