As usual, the event featured many fun opportunities for networking with an awesome opening Keynote and opening event, a massive expo hall filled with UKG experts and partners, 250+ educational breakout sessions, and inspiring keynote sessions including a keynote session with New York Times Best-Selling Author, Viola Davis, If that wasn’t enough, attendees were treated a Customer Appreciation party featuring pop superstar Kelly Clarkson.
Customer Success Stories
One standout area of the opening keynote session was hearing from actual UKG customers who achieved great results after implementing UKG solutions. Seeing how customers leverage the technology to achieve great outcomes proves that the UKG innovations deliver incredible results.
Thirteen customers were honored for collaborating with UKG to achieve transformative, sustainable results supporting their people and business goals. These customers were recognized as Innovation Award winners. It's worth noting that a record number of customers applied for the 2024 awards, highlighting the enthusiasm and success they experienced from their efforts.
“Our Innovation Award winners exemplify that their partnership with UKG transcends world-class technology: it’s about cultivating a culture that embodies their organization’s core purpose,” said Bob DelPonte, executive vice president of customer experience at UKG. “We take immense pride in leveraging our deep industry expertise and data insights to help customers achieve profound business outcomes and create exceptional workplaces in ground-breaking ways.”
Large Enterprise organizations (15,000+ employees)
- Menzies Aviation used its UKG® solution and the UKG Pro® mobile app as the central location for all 55,000 global employees to access information related to pay, work schedules, and vacation requests, and is rolling out the UKG Talk® solution to communicate business wins and critical information company-wide, in an effort to create a culture of belonging, connection, and engagement.
- Six Flags Entertainment processed more than 166,000 AI-powered shift and time-off requests in the UKG Pro Workforce Management™ solution in 2024 — saving 5,500 manual hours. It also experienced a 70% improvement in compliance audits by automating approvals to ensure shifts are only assigned to certified associates and comply with local, federal, and company requirements.
Enterprise organizations (2,501 - 14,999 employees)
- Chimes International, leveraging payroll in the UKG Pro® suite, saved $240,000 annually in payroll department labor costs, achieved $100,000 in savings and reduced its carbon footprint by eliminating HR and payroll paper processes, and reduced new hire onboarding from six to two weeks, which the company credits for overall lower turnover rates.
- City of Detroit created a culture of transparency through its UKG Pro solution, including an 85% adoption of a new performance management process that creates a continuous feedback loop between managers and employees and uses deep data insights to facilitate professional growth.
- Community Health System achieved $2.8 million in cost savings by using UKG solution to reduce missed employee meal breaks and unapproved timecards while simultaneously creating more accurate staff scheduling, which has improved productivity, operational efficiency, and patient-care outcomes.
- Encore pioneered a first-of-its-kind Overtime Savings Program through UKG Wallet™ that provides financial stability for U.S. frontline team members by letting them bank overtime pay — a portion of which the company matches — that they can draw from in the future when their hours may vary due to seasonal fluctuations impacting the hospitality industry.
- Hawaiian Airlines leveraged HR service delivery in UKG to empower its around-the-clock, on-the-move workforce — including pilots and flight attendants — with access to critical HR information when and where they need it.
- SavATree saved more than $1.5 million by leveraging learning management in the UKG Pro suite. These savings came from field-based workers completing training courses on their mobile device, which decreased turnover and increased employee engagement while reducing overall recruiting, training, and print material costs.
Medium-sized organizations (201 – 2,500 employees)
- Gillette Children's Hospital leveraged diversity metrics from the UKG Pro suite to overhaul its recruitment practices, increasing diverse hires from 9.19% to 13%. Self-service options in the UKG suite give employees ways to self-identify pronouns, gender, and LGBTQ+ status, all in support of embracing the bigger picture, one of Gillette’s organizational values focused on inclusivity and belonging.
- Hydro-Gear achieved $175,000 in annual cost savings with learning management in the UKG Ready® suite, saw $95,000 in cost avoidance by rolling out benefits administration, and is leveraging recruiting to expedite hiring, resulting in more qualified candidates being identified earlier in the process.
- ReVision Energy moved annual performance reviews to quarterly conversations between managers and employees via the UKG Ready suite, which has supported more connected and motivated teams thanks to timely, relevant, and actionable feedback. UKG also helps ensure employees are compliant with industry standards and helps track professional licenses and certifications in an efficient and consistent way.
Small organizations (75 – 200 employees)
- KC Care Center leveraged the power of Great Place To Work® Trust Index™ Surveys to listen closely to employees and develop strategies to ultimately become Great Place To Work® Certified™ in 2024 for the first time. The UKG Ready suite also helped create performance-based salary increases, which had been a top request from employees.
- R.E. Darling Co. dramatically streamlined payroll and HR processes with its UKG Ready suite, eliminating payroll-related errors to ensure employees are paid accurately and on time. Additionally, reporting and analytics now help monitor and manage workplace safety, and managers can identify skills gaps and offer targeted training to foster continuous learning and career growth.
About UKG
UKG came to be as a merger between Workforce Management powerhouse Kronos, Inc. and HCM and Payroll leader Ultimate Software. The company was founded in April 2020.
Both companies had an excellent culture (they were both consistently in the very top echelon of the Great Place to Work ratings year over year). This hasn’t changed under the new merger which is excellent news for UKG customers as they always look to infuse this into their products and services (which can be an enabler of any client to maximize their own employee experience).
More than 80,000 organizations across all sizes, industries, and geographies trust UKG HR, payroll, workforce management, and culture cloud solutions to drive great workplace experiences and make better, more confident people and business decisions. With the world’s largest collection of people data, work data, and culture data combined with rich experience using artificial intelligence in the service of people, they connect culture insights with business outcomes to show what’s possible when organizations invest in their people.
Leadership and Vision
This was the first opportunity for customers and prospects to meet two new dynamic additions to the UKG leadership team led by Jennifer Morgan (CEO), and Rachel Barger (President, GTM). You can click here to see the complete team.
All In
CEO Jennifer Morgan’s motto is All In. This message has been clearly articulated across the company, to customers and prospects as well as partners. Every decision the company makes is rooted in the customer first. Below is the key message:
We are all in for our customers: We’re a customer-driven organization. Each and every one of us puts the customer at the center of all that we do. We listen to them, we lead them into the future, and we approach their concerns with urgency. Their success is our success. Above all, we deliver on our promises.
UKG’s position in the market
Consider these facts:
- 80k companies use UKG solutions
- UKG customers do business in 150 countries
- 66%+ Of Fortune 1000 are UKG customers
- #1 Market share for WFM Globally and #2 for HCM
- 75+ years’ Experience in HCM & workforce management
- $300B+ processed in payroll annually
- 14k+ Employees
- 6,000 employees dedicated to the customer experience
- 130+ Culture Award wins since 2021
- 100% score on HRC and by Disability:IN
Vertical Industry Leadership
UKG is strongly positioned in several vertical industries meaning they have deep industry knowledge and data.
Growth
As I’ve mentioned before, their growth trajectory has been truly remarkable. They consistently gain new customers, who, in turn, expand their investments by adding more modules to the suite. This ongoing success has prompted UKG to further invest by expanding their suite of solutions and increasing their team to better serve customer needs.
UKG attributes a significant effect on their growth to their Partner for Life Approach. They say that the core pillars of their partnership that impact retention with any client are:
- Their Culture: Work with engaged, tenured experts who are invested in your success.
- Proactive Partnership: Their teams are structured like your team so you get personally proactive experiences.
- Inclusive Approach: Their partnership, support, training, and more are all included in your software subscription
Product Strategy
UKG offers 2 different suites of products that include Payroll, HCM, and WFM to satisfy both the most complicated requirements (UKG Pro) and a more simplified solution for leaner teams (UKG Ready).
The UKG product vision has not changed; UKG is here to help every organization become a Great Place To Work by building people-centric HR Technology that meets each employee where they are on their journey.
UKG has delivered so many innovations over the past 2 years and has continuously delivered new items on their road map on schedule. To see what they were set to deliver for the second half of 2024 – you can read my article from our May analyst briefing UKG: Full Steam Ahead with Frontline Worker Support, SMB and AI.
UKG is All In partnering with their customers. The customer is an important element when determining new investments in innovation which is a good thing. It means that if you become a UKG customer, you have a seat at the table in helping shape the direction of the product moving forward. In the past 6 months, UKG has:
- Delivered 40% of the Top 50 customer-voted Ideas
- Collected over 4,000 comments to prioritize product improvements
- Hosted nearly 2,000 discovery discussions to gather requirements
- Interviewed 2,600+ customers & users to ensure improvements are easy to use
Every innovation that you will see from UKG is routed in the 4 priorities listed below:
1. Creating great places to work through technology: Of the top 100 Great Place to Work companies, 44 have a large frontline workforce, representing industries such as retail, healthcare, hospitality, manufacturing, construction, energy, and transportation. There is no company that has the quantity and quality of insights along with connectivity to the frontline workforce that they do.
2. Actionable insights through the world’s most differentiated data: Every single day, through their unique set of people, work, and culture data, they give customers visibility across their whole organization as well as what’s happening across the broader global workforce. They know when people are on time when they call in sick, and if they are taking other shifts, referring friends to the company, and what’s critical to their engagement and retention. If their customers know who their best employees are, and they take care of them, those are the gems in their workforce where they can focus more attention and create value. UKG provides its customers, with real actionable insights due to the depth and breadth of its data – all of which live in a single platform UKG calls Flex.
3. Making the complex simple for real-time decision-making: UKG is in a mission-critical business –supporting the employers that keep the economy running– paying them, and keeping them productive and engaged. They are helping organizations keep their workforce ready for the constant change happening around them. UKG solutions help them see what's happening right here and now, hour by hour, and then when things change, predictive and planning capabilities help them adapt so they are more resilient in the face of these changes.
4. The vertical advantage: UKG’s unrivaled depth and breadth in workforce management, with industry-specific specializations, allows UKG to address complexities for the frontline workforce, salaried, gig, and everything in between. From scheduling and compliance to AI and the user experience, UKG customers capitalize on unique vertical depth in functionality that no other vendor can deliver.
New Product Announcements
Bryte AI Agents and Capabilities to Transform Employee Experiences for the UKG Pro HCM suite
- UKG Bryte™ AI agents can complete tasks and solve problems autonomously to speed up decision-making, reduce errors, and simplify frontline employees' environments so that they can focus on the most value-added activities.
- UKG is uniquely positioned to lead on AI due to its industry depth. Bryte AI is trained on specialized and often vertically specific proprietary datasets that UKG has curated based on 30 years of data to support accurate and quality outcomes.
- Agentic AI throughout the UKG Pro® suite will help employees and managers support the creation of great workplace experiences, according to Josh Bersin.
The UKG Bryte AI Agents complete complicated, multi-step processes and proactively solve problems by utilizing modern AI including Large Action Models (LAM) that combine the language fluency of Large Language Models (LLM) with the capacity to complete tasks and decision-making autonomously to help customers achieve their goals. They continuously improve their performance over time by learning from their experiences, often employing reinforcement learning or supervised learning techniques.
Talent Management Agents
An example of this involves the employee promotion process which is often fragmented and highly manual, requiring the execution of multiple, inefficient disconnected tasks. Leveraging the UKG Bryte AI Promotion Agent, UKG is transforming the employee promotion process by streamlining and automating tasks, reducing manual processing time, and mitigating errors in promotion-related workflows. This was just an example of dozens of talent agents UKG highlighted at the event.
Compliance Agents
UKG is also introducing the UKG Bryte AI Continuous Compliance Agent, which allows payroll administrators to quickly respond to ever-changing tax compliance requirements without missing a beat. Instead of spending hours manually tracking, researching, and applying new tax rules, Payroll Admins can utilize the Continuous Compliance agent to identify the impact of new regulations and accelerate the time-consuming setup changes.
“With the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence technology, we are extending our UKG Bryte Generative AI capabilities by developing AI agents that can understand and respond to customer needs in real-time, handling a broad array of tasks, from data analysis, to workflow automation, and customer support,” said Hugo Sarrazin, president, chief product and technology officer at UKG. “Our Bryte AI Agents will work alongside employees and managers, particularly those in frontline roles, taking on tasks that are best suited for technology. This allows people to focus on the aspects of their jobs that have the biggest impact on their organizations.”
With a commitment to responsible and ethical AI utilization, UKG’s connected agents will allow the organization to determine which tasks can be completed autonomously while ensuring there are built-in checkpoints that require people to review and accept. UKG Bryte is trained on the world’s largest collection of people data, work data, and culture data, including three decades of proprietary benchmarks and best practices from Great Place To Work, a UKG company.
“In HR and operations, the opportunity for agentic AI is everywhere. There are hundreds of time-consuming checklist-driven tasks and processes that are difficult to automate because steps have multiple paths or require independent judgement,” said Josh Bersin, founder, CEO, and global industry analyst at The Josh Bersin Company. “The UKG connected AI agents have the potential to reduce this workload tremendously, liberating HR teams to focus on building a great workplace experience.”
UKG has a Massive amount of data to draw from to make its AI offerings Robust
AI is great but you need to draw from data to make it effective. UKG is uniquely positioned to lead the AI stage of HCM technology, mainly due to decades of data that underpins Bryte AI. This data will make its models more accurate, more in the context of industry, employee, and work, and extremely robust. See the below slide to understand the magnitude of the UKG data available.
Industry-specific Agents
UKG not only has deep data but also deep Vertical knowledge in areas like Healthcare, Retail, Manufacturing, Distribution, Public Sector and so on. It is this vertical knowledge that will allow UKG to develop agents that are trained on vertical data to help customers intelligently automate tasks including staffing, forecasting, scheduling and managing by exceptions. Examples include Daily Staffing Agent for Retail, and Self-Scheduling (for nurses) in Healthcare.
AI-powered Talent Marketplace Solution to Optimize Skills Development and Close Critical Labor Gaps
- Organizations can fill critical labor gaps by modernizing skills development and unlocking career opportunities for roles across the workforce
- Creating gig-like experiences will create new opportunities for both frontline employees and knowledge workers while providing people and organizations with more flexibility
This AI-powered talent management application is designed to fill critical labor gaps for the business while opening doors to new career opportunities for frontline employees and knowledge workers alike. The first release of Talent Marketplace is the Internal Talent Marketplace (available in early 2025) which will allow people across a broad array of roles and job types, including hourly and salaried positions, to create talent profiles, map their career interests, and identify the skills they need today to prepare for the roles they seek tomorrow. Targeting fall 2025, External Talent Marketplace (second half of 2025) will expand to help organizations draw from a qualified pool of external talent that can be leveraged to fill labor gaps when necessary.
“In today’s fast-moving world, business agility is more important than ever, yet many organizations still struggle to create meaningful growth and development opportunities for their frontline workforces,” said Stacia Garr, co-founder, RedThread Research. “The UKG Pro Talent Marketplace solution is designed to provide frontline employees across various industries with clarity on their current skills and experiences and to map a pathway to help them identify and achieve the promotions and new opportunities they’ll seek in the future.”
A hallmark of every great place to work is the opportunity for employees to learn new skills, develop new talents, and advance in their careers. A recent UKG study of frontline employees and leaders around the world found that 68% of frontline employees are interested in learning new skills, 58% believe continuous learning is important for their personal and/or professional growth, and 73% don’t mind learning new skills on their own time outside of work hours.
“This labor market is incredibly dynamic and constantly changing, as we’ve seen over the last several years, with the preferences of both frontline employees and knowledge workers continuing to rapidly evolve” said Hugo Sarrazin, president, chief product and technology officer at UKG. “The launch of UKG Talent Marketplace will provide all workers with more choice and autonomy over their development, helping to boost retention, engagement, and effort, while creating new gig-like pathways for organizations to fill their labor needs. It’s a win-win that will modernize how organizations manage and grow talent.”
UKG One View Direct – Standalone Global Payroll Platform
Building on the success of UKG One View Connect, which harmonizes all payroll data globally to provide real-time, data-backed insights for business decisions, One View Direct creates a single process in one solution to synchronize, manage, and perpetually validate payroll calculations from all in-country payroll providers. It gives our multinational customers the ability to self-manage their in-country providers through similar capabilities UKG has in One View Managed Services. One View Direct will be in early adopter in the first quarter of 2025 and GA soon after.
UKG Ready Adds Sophisticated Functionality Other Competitors Can’t Match
UKG Ready benefits from the deep investments into the UKG Pro Suite. Because the development is already done for Pro, sophisticated features can easily migrate down to Ready (competitive products would have to invest heavily to provide the same functionality which is usually cost-prohibitive). Since Ready has this advantage you will find many features that just don’t exist with similar products.
Great Place To Work Hub: This is a unique offering, different than UKG Pro GPTW Hub but is still powered by the same dataset (H1 2025). It enables Ready customers to turn HR metrics into opportunities to help customers build a great workplace by bringing together research, customer HR data, and employee surveys to help them benchmark themselves and get recommendations to help them elevate their cultures to engage and retain their people.
Artificial Intelligence Brings Simplicity and Time Savings to Hiring Processes: UKG and HR.com research shows that retaining key talent (60%) and hiring qualified employees (56%) are two primary concerns for small to mid-sized businesses. UKG Ready Job Genius and Interview Guide, powered by UKG Ready Bryte AI™, will soon simplify the recruiting process for HR leaders and hiring managers using generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to compose compelling job descriptions based off the skills, qualifications, and requirements provided by the hiring manager. UKG Ready Job Genius and Interview Guide will also recommend a series of relevant interview questions based on the same set of criteria to support efficient hiring practices while saving HR and hiring managers time.
Deeper Integrations to Meet Growing Business Needs: Leveraging the UKG Ready suite’s open and extensible solution, customers will soon benefit from the ability to quickly and efficiently upload their general ledger information into NetSuite Inc., a cloud-based enterprise software that provides business management solutions. This integration, built directly into the UKG Ready solution, will provide real-time financial insights, help to ensure data accuracy, and increase efficiencies. In addition, through integration with Employee Navigator, a benefits administration and HR software provider, benefits brokers whose clients use the UKG Ready tool will be able to more easily manage employee benefits, set up competitive plans, and maintain compliance on behalf of their clients.
One View Integration: Now users of UKG Ready can manage global payroll needs with this integration of One View directly into the product. There are a growing number of smaller businesses that have employees globally and the issue of managing payroll is now not an issue with this integration.
Canadian Payroll: UKG Ready will now be available in Canada with native Canadian Payroll. This is a big step and will be a welcome addition to the Canadian HCM landscape.
What’s on the Roadmap?
Every innovation that you will see from UKG is routed in the 4 priorities
- Creating great places to work through technology
- Actionable insights through the world’s most differentiated data
- Making the complex simple for real-time decision-making
- The vertical advantage
Creating great places to work through technology: Major investments in this area include reimagining the experience across key modules. These investments are focused on the areas of the application users interact with most, recruiting, onboarding, compensation, performance, and time. They are driven by customer feedback and user research. Other UX investments enhance accessibility across the suite. The product showcase will focus on Bryte Assisted Search, the new conversational, personalized experience that provides answers to employees, unified across the suite.
Beyond the user experience, they will continue to enhance UKG Pro Great Place to Work Hub (GPTW Hub) to help customers truly transform their cultures through technologies. Key enhancements to GPTW Hub:
- Leadership Actions: Promotes leadership effectiveness, through insights (from Great Place To Work®) and action plans (integration with UKG Pro Goals), empowering people-leaders to drive organizational and cultural success (coming H1 2025)
- GPTW Hub view for Managers: A dashboard that looks across key areas within the team providing visibility into elements such as equity, fatigue, burnout, and engagement. It also provides best practices from GPTW to help managers take action (H2 2025).
- Industry Benchmarks: Benchmarking data that helps customers compare to peers in their industry vertical, and surfaces areas of opportunity to help them continue to improve their cultures (H1 2025).
Other enhancements include nudges in UKG Talk (H1 2025) guiding managers in the flow of work to celebrate and recognize key moments, and integrating Pulse Surveys within Employee Voice to Pro Coaching and Development where Bryte AI recommends actions for the managers as a result of these surveys, e.g. schedule check-in meetings and joining peer communities in UKG Talk (H1 2025).
Actionable insights through the world’s most differentiated data: UKG benefits from a unique trove of HR, Culture, and Work data. The large amount of data coupled with their depth of understanding of industry verticals help make their recommendations, AI models, and insights more accurate and more contextualized for key personas. See the following innovations:
- Connected Agents: Connected Agents orchestrate multiple Agentic capabilities to perform everyday tasks for the user. For example, the Promotion Agent orchestrates 26 different tasks (e.g. Initiate promotion request, verify employee information, determine level of promotion, handle location change, retrieve first date, etc.) that touch 8 different personas and makes over 10 recommendations.
- Industry-specific Agents: These agents are trained on vertical data to help customers intelligently automate tasks including staffing, forecasting, scheduling and managing by exceptions. Examples include Daily Staffing Agent for Retail, and Self-Scheduling (for nurses) in Healthcare
Finally, there will be a new Benchmarking solution within Pro where customers can benchmark themselves in areas such as fatigue, burnout, and overtime, average time off taken by employees within their industry, geographies, or demographics.
Making the complex simple for real-time decision-making: In addition to the launch of One View Direct, key innovations include:
- One View Compliance Hub: It provides a global command center to help customers manage by exceptions in real time. From changes to country-specific information required by local jurisdictions to employee classifications and everything in between, One View Compliance Hub turns global compliance into an exact science, by perpetually validating gross-to-net data throughout the payroll process (H1 2025).
- Multi-byte support in Pro: This will simplify the process of supporting global employees with multi-byte languages and localization formats for global profile data, ensuring accurate data entry and compliance across regions (H2 2025).
- Continuous Compliance Agent: Powered by Bryte AI, the Continuous Compliance Agent, payroll administrators can quickly respond to ever-changing tax compliance requirements without missing a beat. Instead of spending hours manually tracking, researching, and applying new tax rules, the Payroll Admins can depend on the Agent to identify the impact and accelerate the time-consuming setup changes (H2 2025).
Other innovations include High-Volume Hiring and Candidate Relationship Management (H2 2025), modernizing their user experiences and using the power of Bryte AI for candidate sourcing and matching, smart guidance for performance goals (H1 2025), and the Benefits Enrollment Agent within Pro Benefits Hub (H1 and H2 2025).
Finally, they are introducing Intelligent Control Plane (H1 and H2 2025) that puts administrators in the driver’s seat to manage the UKG application. Powered by Bryte AI and leverages industry-specific best practices, it recommends configurations, extensibility integrations, and tenant provisioning.
The Vertical Advantage: UKG continues to be the leader in Workforce Management (WFM) solutions thanks to their deep vertical capabilities and depth across industries including Retail, Healthcare, Public Sector, Manufacturing, Services and Distribution. They are constantly learning and co-designing with the world’s largest organizations that use UKG solutions every day.
I have already discussed their intention to add Vertical AI Agents. They are also doing a few other things:
- Long-term Volume Planning: Coming to Strategic Workforce Planning in H1 2025, it will enable Retailers to use sales and volume history within WFM to produce long-term forecasts to drive workload planning. Supported by Bryte AI, customers will be able to forecast 12 months into the future, leveraging all the POS data already in our suite.
- Shift Incentivization: Coming in H1 2025, brings the power of Bryte AI to dynamically price shifts, enabling Healthcare organizations to optimize their scheduling processes and reduce costs. With its intelligent AI and UKG data, it can find and learn from patterns in the UKG scheduling data to identify hard-to-fill shifts. Then, using dynamic pricing, incentives can be applied to the shifts that most need coverage, increasing fill rates in areas with the greatest need.
- Strategic Workforce Planning for Manufacturing: This product has been available for Retail since 2023, and it is now optimized for Manufacturers to help them produce workforce plans, forecasted from the bottom up, over any period – weeks, months, and years ahead. Customers are able to produce Wage Budgets, factoring all labor activities and funding considerations.
Other enhancements include Bryte AI-driven insights for intra-day intra-week availability in Retail (H2 2025), open shift recommendations based on skills, certifications and availability for nurses (H2 2025), and a modernized user experience for the Public Sector scheduling solution, UKG TeleStaff (H2 2025).
My Take
That’s a lot of innovation both delivered and on the roadmap. More importantly, it is innovation that is yielding tangible results for UKG customers as seen in the section outlining the UKG Innovation awards. Customers are using Bryte and seeing results. They are using Great Place To Work Hub and are even getting certified as a Great Place To Work. This goes to show that UKG is living up to its mission UKG is here to help every organization become a Great Place To Work by building people-centric HR Technology that meets each employee where they are on their journey. They have worked hard to put the foundational pieces in like the Flex platform, Great Place To Work, Bryte AI, deeper scheduling capabilities, One View, and more and now we are starting to see them deliver interesting innovations based on these building blocks.
