This May in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, UKG provided an update on their progress and future direction during their spring analyst briefing with more than 40 Analysts from across the globe. Following up on my December 2024 report , this session highlighted UKG's continued evolution as a company . As a global provider with a significant customer base, UKG offers a comprehensive suite including Payroll, HCM, Workforce Management, HR Service Delivery, and Great Place To Work®, and UKG One View solution, which addresses global payroll complexities by unifying visibility across diverse in-country payroll systems  . UKG caters to all business sizes with UKG Pro for complex enterprises and UKG Ready for smaller, less complex organizations. With more than 80,000 customers in 150 countries and 14,000 global employees (75% focused on product development and services), UKG has invested significantly  in its solutions over the past five years.



Leadership and Vision
The meeting was kicked off with a fascinating session from UKG’s CEO, Jennifer Morgan. Since her arrival less than 12-months ago, UKG has matured quite a bit in terms of its approach and focus on customer experience, leadership and internal culture, product and platform, and partnering with other industry leaders. All of these are aimed squarely on Jennifer Morgan’s motto of All In which is encapsulated by this statement:

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.

Breaking down the key messages

Enhancing the Customer Experience
UKG is fundamentally transforming its customers' journey by harnessing the power of AI. This means reimagining how they interact with their data, manage workflows, and connect with their people. Through the integration of AI and AI agents into UKG solutions, customers can expect quicker deployments, deeper insights from their workforce data, and immediate support. To support this, UKG has launched an innovative AI-powered Customer Experience Center that is designed to create a service model that is proactive, empathetic, predictive, and significantly faster – aiming for real-time assistance.

Talent and Culture Transformation
With a new leadership team now in place, UKG has also successfully drawn in a remarkable array of talented individuals whose extensive experience, vibrant energy, and ability to inspire are crucial for its ongoing transformation. Furthermore, UKG has instituted a Global Leadership Team, encompassing all areas of the company, dedicated to maximizing its execution, fostering comprehensive coordination, and leveraging talent throughout the organization.

Product and Platform Innovation
Leveraging the world's largest workforce dataset, UKG is developing more intelligent and adaptable solutions specifically designed for various industries and roles. These include innovations like intelligent payroll automation, dynamic labor planning, frontline worker enablement, and talent development. UKG is deploying AI on a large scale, from orchestrating global payroll to optimizing healthcare shift planning and retail scheduling, transforming daily workforce management for more than 80,000 customers and tens of millions of their employees.

Partnership Innovation
UKG collaborates with various partners to enhance its offerings and meet diverse customer needs through the UKG Marketplace. The ecosystem is divided into three main categories: Technology Partners, Services Partners, and Advisory Partners. With more than 285 Technology Partners, such as Microsoft and LinkedIn, UKG extends the value of its solutions by building integrations. The more than 85 Services Partners, including well-known firms like Accenture and KPMG, focus on implementing UKG solutions and facilitating business transformation for clients. Finally, Advisory Partners, which encompass benefit brokers and private equity firms, help to influence business opportunities and expand UKG's market reach.

UKG is strategically expanding its global partner ecosystem with Jay Dettling, the new Chief Partner Officer, at the helm. A significant development is the new partnership with ServiceNow, focusing on integrating AI capabilities across both systems. The goal is to enhance productivity and engagement in payroll, HR, and workforce management, facilitate seamless agent-to-agent experiences, and provide access to predictive workforce insights that UKG is distinctively positioned to offer at scale.



UKG is building an AI-First Platform
UKG is creating the leading AI-first workforce platform, leveraging its deep expertise, vast data, and modern architecture. As workplace demands evolve, UKG helps customers adapt by embedding insights into their workflows. This is achieved through:

• Data: Intelligence from 40 million employees to optimize planning, engagement, scheduling, and pay.
• AI-First Design: Rearchitecting the workforce experience around AI, with its People Fabric unifying data for real-time insights and intelligent automation.
• Vertical Expertise: Unmatched understanding of diverse industry workforces.

UKG's goal is to transform how people work and unlock productivity with a future-proof, modernized platform offering a multi-agent, conversational experience. Its Bryte AI layer, impacting 10M+ employees monthly with more than 2,500 models, now integrates GenAI for predictive, personalized, and proactive support.

Product Update and Vision
UKG's product vision focuses on creating people-centric technology to help organizations become Great Places To Work. Its architecture features the FleX People Fabric, unifying diverse data (HR, scheduling, pay) for various modules, and the Bryte Agentic Experience layer for functions from sourcing to payroll.

Customer feedback is key to UKG's product roadmap. This roadmap is also shaped by current workforce trends like frontline labor/skills shortages, macroeconomic and regulatory uncertainty, and demands for a future-ready workforce. Key technological advancements influencing the roadmap include the shift to multi-agent systems, new interaction modalities (like voice and conversational AI), harnessing business data for insights, and preparing for an autonomous future.

UKG's solutions are informed by deep customer understanding and extensive operational scale:

• Work:  12+ billion schedules created; 10 billion punches recorded.
• People & Culture:  750+ million applicants processed; 70 million hires managed; 20+ million annual survey participants.
• Pay: $1 trillion in payroll calculated across 170+ countries.

This is complemented by strong vertical market penetration:

• Healthcare: Serving 87% of the largest 100 U.S. hospital systems.
• Retail: Used by 77% of Fortune 1000 retail companies.
• Transportation & Delivery: 92% penetration in Fortune 100 companies.
• Automotive: Clients include 9 out of 10 top global automakers.

UKG investments for H2 2025
UKG's H2 roadmap prioritizes an "AI First" approach centered on three pillars: an extensible, intelligent platform; a resilient workforce; and high-performance teams.

1. Intelligent, Extensible Platform: UKG aims to empower users with AI-driven workforce intelligence via its People Fabric. Key initiatives include a conversational Report Hub, new Power Next Gen Document Management, and an Intelligent Control Plane. Extensibility will be enhanced through FleX Compose for self-service, a No-Code Experience, an Agent Orchestrator for multi-agent systems, and an Open AI Platform.
2. Resilient Workforce (Planning, Scheduling, Pay): Innovations focus on deepening vertical strengths with AI-Powered Unified Workforce Planning (e.g., Retail Forecasting, Healthcare Staffing), Intra-week Capacity Planning, and Dynamic Labor Management. UKG will improve integrations like Position Automation and unified Pay/Time/Bryte capabilities. Frontline productivity will be boosted via conversational Employee Self-Service and manager task automation. Global payroll advancements include One View Direct for end-to-end processes and Intelligent Payroll Automation ("Touchless Pay") leveraging UKG Bryte AI.
3. High-Performance Teams (Employee Engagement): Leveraging AI, Great Place To Work (GPTW) insights, and UKG Talk, initiatives include a new Candidate Sourcing Agent and high-volume hiring capabilities to speed talent acquisition. Internal mobility will be fostered by the new Internal Talent Marketplace with Bryte Career Possibilities. Leadership development will be supported by a new HR Agent offering embedded training and surveys. AI-first employee engagement will be driven by GPTW 2.0 for actionable goals, Talk 2.0 with AI-powered engagement, Search and Act 2.0 for self-service, and UKG Wallet integration.

Looking into 2026
Looking ahead to FY26, UKG plans to evolve into an "AI-First Suite," transforming its offerings into an "AI-First workforce intelligent platform." This vision emphasizes a conversational relationship between users, their software, and work, supporting them throughout their careers.
Key principles for this AI-First, Conversational Suite will fundamentally reimagine user experience:

• No Homepage: Entry will be unique to the user's immediate task (e.g., payroll, scheduling).
• Adaptive Reasoning: The system will learn and adjust based on user behavior and purpose.
• Fluid and Adaptive UI (AUI): The interface will dynamically build around user tasks and workflows.
• Journey, Not Onboarding: Users will seamlessly carry their workspace and skills across jobs and time.
• Scalable Simplicity: The UI will match the complexity of the task, remaining simple yet capable of rich interactions.
• Conversational Abstraction: Complexity will be managed through intuitive, fluid conversational interactions.

Go To Market Strategy
UKG is advancing its go-to-market (GTM) strategy by shifting from a product-centric approach to outcome- and persona-based strategies. These strategies align with the full employee lifecycle, encompassing Plan, Engage, Schedule, and Pay. Leveraging the power of its data, UKG uniquely positions itself as THE AI-first workforce platform supporting every great organization. This approach delivers measurable value across boardroom, HR, operations, and payroll functions. With deep industry expertise and AI-driven solutions, UKG empowers organizations of any size to optimize labor planning, enhance employee engagement, streamline scheduling, and ensure accurate, compliant payroll execution.

We saw examples of this with a few customer video case studies:

• Costa Coffee utilized UKG’s Strategic Workforce Planning to improve labor forecasting and capacity planning, which enabled better agility and performance during peak seasons (PLAN).
• KC Care Health Center leveraged UKG’s Great Place To Work Hub and predictive AI to drive employee engagement, leading to improved patient care outcomes (ENGAGE).
• Hunter Industries simplified its HR operations and empowered employees by using UKG Bryte’s AI-assisted search, thereby reducing administrative burden and improving access to information (ENGAGE).
• Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants used UKG Pro and UKG Talk to enhance scheduling flexibility, allowing staff to manage shifts more easily while maintaining service quality (SCHEDULE).
• A2 Global Electronics integrated global payroll and workforce management through UKG, improving processing speed and achieving unified visibility (PAY).

Customer Experience Update
UKG is actively transforming its customer experience (CX) by focusing on AI-driven innovation, premium service models, and operational excellence, all aimed at earning customer loyalty at scale. The company has observed measurable improvements in customer satisfaction across its UKG Pro, Ready, and Pro WFM solutions. These gains are driven by enhancements in its support model, better product integration, and the launch of a Sales-to-Service Concierge.

Underscoring this progress, more than 1,500 customers have gone live in the past six months, with AI now being utilized to capture sales notes, which helps to streamline implementation and reduce friction for new clients.

UKG's AI strategy is deeply embedded throughout the entire customer journey. This includes implementations of smart case routing, agentic onboarding processes, payroll validation assistants, and conversational support agents. These AI-powered innovations are designed to reduce time-to-resolution for issues, deflect potential cases, improve self-service capabilities for users, and ultimately lower the overall cost-to-serve.

Further enhancing its service offerings, UKG is introducing The Emerald Experience. This premium, tiered service model provides customers with dedicated experts, proactive management, and strategic guidance tailored to their specific needs, with early adopters like Nestlé already reporting significant value. To support these enhanced services, UKG is launching the Customer Experience Center (CEC). Envisioned as a “NASA control center,” the CEC will proactively monitor incidents, customer feedback, and performance across all touchpoints, thereby uniting UKG's teams around a single, comprehensive view of the customer.

Finally, UKG is experiencing rapid growth in its Managed Services division, with a notable 200% year-over-year increase in demand. The company's Managed Services offerings span critical areas such as payroll, benefits, HRIS, compliance, and workforce management. These services are designed to meet customers where they are, delivering expert-led, end-to-end support to address their specific operational needs.



UKG Ready Update
UKG Ready is achieving its long-term vision to be the premier AI-first workforce platform for emerging and less complex organizations, emphasizing simplicity, actionable insights, and scalability. To achieve this, UKG Ready's strategy focuses on ongoing investment in several key areas:

Accelerating Growth in SMB
To bolster growth in the small to medium-sized business (SMB) sector, UKG Ready has appointed a dedicated SMB sales leader, introduced new product bundles (Essentials, Plus, Premium), and launched a reimagined, AI-powered self-service onboarding experience. These initiatives are reportedly driving faster time-to-value, improving win rates, and boosting customer satisfaction.

Simplifying the User Experience
Simplifying the user experience is another core focus. UKG Ready has modernized its user interface, incorporated AI-powered tools like Search and Act, and streamlined critical workflows, including benefits setup, payroll processing, and document management. This results in a cleaner, more intuitive interface tailored for lean teams.

Growing Global Presence
UKG Ready is also expanding its global footprint. Recent milestones include launching the solution in Canada with native payroll, enhancing compliance capabilities in regions like France, introducing native payroll in the UK, and integrating with UKG One View to provide consistent global operational control.

Embedding GenAI Across the Suite
Underpinning these efforts is a comprehensive AI-first strategy. Bryte AI agents are embedded across the UKG Ready suite, powering features from payroll insights and benefits modeling to employee self-service and culture-building tools like the Great Place To Work Hub. This AI strategy prioritizes trust (highlighted by the Bryte Confidence Score), enhanced productivity, and extensibility through interconnected intelligent agents.

Recent Releases and Roadmap Highlights
UKG Ready continues to deliver innovations across the employee lifecycle:

• Plan: Out-of-the-box integrations with accounting and financial applications such as NetSuite, Sage, and QuickBooks are now available. Additionally, UKG Ready has integrated with Employee Navigator (also available now) to help customers better plan and administer employee benefits with their brokers. Looking ahead, Bryte AI Conversational Reporting is slated for Q4 2025 to inform manager and administrator decisions.
• Engage: Customers can now better understand their workforce using the Great Place To Work Hub. This will be further enhanced by Bryte AI insights and benchmarking data in Q2 2025. A new Document Hub, designed for streamlined hiring and onboarding, will enter Early Access in Q4 2025. Furthermore, Bryte Search and Assist will be upgraded with "Search and Act" capabilities in Q4 2025, enabling the system to take actions and complete tasks on behalf of users.
• Schedule: To improve schedule management, UKG Ready will soon offer a more engaging candidate experience with an interview self-scheduling feature, expected in Q3 2025.
• Pay: UKG Ready has launched its payroll solution in the UK, continuing its global expansion. Key upcoming capabilities include a Paycheck AI Agent (Q3 2025) to help employees better understand their compensation, and AI-powered accrual management for policy-driven automation (Q3 2025). The platform also continues to simplify the pay experience for administrators with a modernized payroll processing view anticipated in Q3/Q4 2025.

UKG Pro Update
UKG Pro is spearheading the future of workforce technology with its AI-first platform, designed to empower organizations to intelligently and agilely plan, engage, schedule, and pay their workforce on a global scale.
UKG Pro's investment themes are geared towards maintaining its leadership in modern HCM applications, particularly for complex global organizations. These themes include:

• Leveraging a Unified Data Layer and an Extensible, Intelligent Platform: UKG Pro has modernized its architecture with FleX Compose, unified its data through People Fabric, and introduced AI-powered tools such as Conversational Reporting and Reporting Hub. These enhancements enable real-time insights, facilitate cross-suite workflows, and provide extensibility at scale.
• Creating High-Performance Teams: The platform delivers intelligent, personalized experiences designed to help leaders inspire and enable their people. This is achieved through AI-driven performance reviews, internal mobility features, and robust leadership development tools.
• Growing and Leading a Resilient Workforce: UKG Pro assists organizations in adapting to change and thriving by focusing on automation, compliance, and frontline enablement. These capabilities are powered by connected AI agents and solutions tailored for specific verticals.

Key highlights from UKG Pro's recent releases and upcoming roadmap include:
Plan:

• Strategic Workforce Planning featuring AI-driven scenario modeling and intra-week staffing insights (Available Now / 2025.R2).
• AI-guided Payroll Modeling and Benefits Cost Analysis for smarter financial planning (2025.R2).
• Conversational Reporting providing real-time, natural language insights across HCM and WFM (Available Now).

Engage:

• Internal Talent Marketplace and Microlearning to unlock employee growth and mobility (Available Now / 2025.R2).
• Performance Self-Reviews with Bryte AI summarization and goal-setting assistance (Available Now).
• Great Place to Work Hub offering leadership actions and benchmarking data (Available Now).
• New Hire Agent , Job Change Agent, Benefits Enrollment Agent, and Benefits Modeling Agent to streamline onboarding and decision-making processes (2025.R2).
• Employee Voice , Check-ins, and Explain My Pay features to build trust and transparency (Available Now / 2025.R2).
• UKG Wallet Integration for earned wage access directly within the Pro application (Available Now).

Schedule:

• Self-Scheduling Agent and Shift Incentives designed to optimize coverage and reduce employee burnout (Early Access / 2025.R2).
• Frontline Assist offering real-time, conversational task support for employees (Available Now).
• Dynamic Labor Management to help managers effectively respond to callouts, shift swaps, and compliance requirements (2025.R2).

Pay:

• Payroll Processing Agent , Anomaly Detection, and Touchless Payroll capabilities to ensure accuracy and mitigate risk (Early Access / 2025.R2).
• One View for global payroll orchestration and efficient contractor payments (Early Access).
• Global Compliance Agent designed to detect and respond to legislative changes (Early Access).

UKG Pro is uniquely positioned to serve frontline industries by leveraging the richest dataset in the market, which includes tens of billions of schedules and punches, and tens of millions of employee culture surveys. Its Connected AI Agents are trained on this extensive data to deliver tailored, vertical-specific solutions in sectors such as healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and the public sector.

My Take
UKG showcased significant positive advancements driven by a clear vision under new leadership, emphasizing an "All In" customer-centric approach. The company is successfully transforming customer experiences by deeply embedding AI across its solutions, leading to quicker deployments, richer workforce insights, immediate proactive support, and measurable improvements in customer satisfaction. This AI-first strategy, powered by the Bryte AI layer and extensive workforce data, is enabling UKG to deliver intelligent, adaptable products that revolutionize daily workforce management for its 80,000 customers globally. A revitalized leadership team and a successful talent acquisition drive are also key to this positive trajectory, fostering a culture focused on strong execution and customer success.

The tangible benefits of UKG's strategic initiatives are highlighted by customer successes and robust product evolution across its portfolio. Businesses are achieving enhanced labor forecasting, like Costa Coffee; improved employee engagement leading to better patient care, as seen with KC Care Health Center; simplified HR operations at Hunter Industries; greater scheduling flexibility for Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants; and streamlined global payroll for A2 Global Electronics. Both UKG Ready, tailored for emerging businesses, and UKG Pro, for complex global enterprises, are rapidly advancing as AI-first platforms, delivering faster time-to-value, simplified user experiences, and a suite of innovative features for planning, engagement, scheduling, and pay. Furthermore, UKG's expanding partner ecosystem, including a new collaboration with ServiceNow, and significant growth in areas like its Managed Services—which saw a 200% year-over-year increase in demand—demonstrate a commitment to providing comprehensive, expert-led support and extending value to customers.