UKG is a product of the 2020 merger between Workforce Management powerhouse Kronos and HCM/Payroll leader Ultimate Software. They have a global reach and a large customer base with product offerings including Payroll, HCM, Workforce Management, HR Service Delivery and Great Place To Work®. They have tackled the Global Payroll problem by introducing UKG One View which is a multi-country payroll solution that can be deployed in days to weeks to unify payroll visibility across the globe, regardless of payroll execution method – in-country service providers, ERP payroll engines, or custom in-house solutions
They are one of the few solution providers that can handle all company sizes from small business, midmarket, and enterprise. UKG offers a dedicated solution for enterprise customers (500 employees or larger) UKG Pro and an offering designed specifically for smaller organizations (500 employees or less) UKG Ready.
UKG has over 80,000 customers who operate in 150 countries with 15,000 employees globally (75% of these employees are dedicated to building products and providing services). In the past 5 years, they have invested over $2,8B in building and enhancing their solutions.
Their belief in building an outstanding culture for their employees translates into an operation dedicated to creating exceptional products and customer experiences.
Here are some notable points of recognition regarding their culture;
- Voted #1 in Newsweek's Greatest Workplaces for Women & Diversity and Forbes Greatest Workplaces
- #3 Best Place to Work in IT from Computerworld
- 100% Best Place to Work in IT from Computerworld
- 100% Disability Equality Index, Best Place to Work for Disability Inclusion by Disability:IN,
- 4 times voted Top Company for Women Technologists by AnitaB.org
Product Strategy
UKG's mission is 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 is uniquely positioned to execute this vision due to three key differentiators:
- UKG helps organizations to be a great place to work: In 2021, UKG acquired Great Place To Work® and has been infusing it into all UKG products to help their customers become great workplaces as well.
- UKG is designing human-centered solution suites: They put humans at the center of their design for the UKG Pro and UKG Ready suites, building connected experiences where people feel supported and cared for. They intentionally chose to build on Google’s platform due to their firsthand experience with end users, and their leadership in infrastructure, especially GenAI.
- They make the hard stuff simple: They manage the most complex workforce challenges across industries all around the globe: Their 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.
Over 60% of the global workforce consists of frontline workers - UKG is committed to engaging and optimizing experiences for these workers in all the products they build.
Listening to customers is an important part of UKG’s product development strategy
In the past 12 months, UKG has engaged in over 1600 discussions with UKG Pro clients and another 2000 with UKG Ready clients regarding opportunities to enhance their offerings. In all, they have delivered 40% of the top ideas in UKG Pro and 60% in UKG Ready. In total, they have delivered over 370 capabilities in the first half of 2024. Key highlights include the new UKG Pro mobile app, which has been embraced widely and reviewed very positively (4.6 starts on the app store) since its general availability in March, UKG Pro Great Place To Work hub, extending UKG Talk’s communication and collaboration capabilities beyond hourly workers to include all employees, enhancements in global hiring, open shift incentives (for example, Uber vouchers), predictive shift and pay compliance, and much more.
Key enhancements to Ready in the first half of 2024 delivered enhanced employee, manager, and administrator experiences (homepage, compliance hub, benefits), added new languages, and more proactive alerts.
The second half of 2024 will deliver even more capabilities to Pro and Ready customers. For Pro key enhancements will focus on user experiences including hub designs, recruiting and onboarding, and more configurable experiences. Continuing to build on the relationship with Lightcast, Pro will infuse skills across the suite. AI will be a major area of investment with Bryte AI innovations added to more talent, workforce management and payroll capabilities. For Ready, I expect more infusion of Great Place To Work insights and benchmarking, bolstering global capabilities with One View integrations, and adding more value to SMBs with products like expense tracking and project costing.
Innovative Product Launches
UKG Pro Great Place To Work® Hub
This unique solution turns typical HR metrics into opportunities to build inclusive, equitable cultures by bringing together UKG research, their customers’ data, and their employees’ voices.
Dashboards throughout the employee journey surface key metrics from the UKG Pro Suite – diversity of talent pools, drill downs around promotions, and voice of the employees from the Trust Index™ survey, helps customers prioritize areas of opportunity. Equally important, they can benchmark their people's practices against the top companies in their specific industry and receive guidance on how to best support their people.
in the past 6 months over 50 customers added Great Place To Work Hub to their UKG Pro suite. The feedback has been extremely positive.
Next. UKG Pro Workforce Management customers will be able to deploy this solution to help elevate the experience of their frontline employees to help retain them.
Great Place To Work Hub will soon be added to UKG Ready with specific insights aimed at the small business owners.
UKG One View - Now delivering
One View is a multi-country payroll solution that can be deployed in days to weeks to unify payroll visibility across the globe, regardless of payroll execution method – in-country service providers, ERP payroll engines, or custom in-house solutions. UKG One View is unique as it creates one operational standard across schedule-to-fund, which drives process efficiency and consistent pay experience for all customers and employees worldwide.
In the last few months, over a dozen customers chose UKG One View to pay over 120 thousand employees so they can deliver accurate, compliant payrolls and consistent experience to their people across more than 50 countries.
Key enhancements to One View will add full self-management capabilities for their customers to work directly with regional and in-country providers through One View Direct, and AI will power auto-validation of HR and Payroll data in real-time to drive further efficiency, accuracy, and compliance.
One View is currently available for UKG Pro customers and will be fully integrated with UKG Ready by the end of summer 2024.
UKG’s AI Strategy
UKG has been doing AI since before 2015 and has more than 2500 active AI models in use across the suite. More than 10 million of their customers’ employees are touched by AI each month. Currently, they have more than 100 data scientists, product managers, and engineers
building AI solutions.
Last November they announced UKG Bryte AI, their GenAI solution powered by their unique and rich datasets that span people data (HCM), work data, (WFM), and culture data (Great Place To Work). UKG Bryte is currently in controlled release with some of their customers where they are testing several use cases including::
- Job Genius & Interview Guides
- Skills Pathing
- Great Place to Work (GPTW) Assist
- GPTW Leadership Actions
- Bryte Assist
- Frontline Insights
- Performance Self Reviews
- Conversational Reporting
Currently in discovery are over 1,000 use cases that are being developed
The goal of UKG Bryte is to do the following:
- Remove friction: Improve the productivity and efficiency of managers and employees,
- Reduce cognitive overload: Provide users with more insights and guidance based on learning people’s work preferences, patterns, and intents,
- Foster innovation: Generate new insights and content, delegate tasks, and personalize Experiences.
Where is UKG going with AI in 2024
Everything you may have heard or read about AI up until now has been Copilot & Assistants (Large Language Models). UKG is focusing on building the future of hyper-personalization with
industry pre-trained AI models and agents.
Their vision for AI is a world of hyper-personalized experiences achieved through adding Large Agentic (or Action) Models (LAMs) to Bryte AI capabilities to create Connected Agents.
Connected Agents
Interacting through natural language conversations, Connected Agents will serve in specific functional UKG suite domains, including talent acquisition, workforce management, payroll, and HR transaction and document processing. These agents will use LAMs (Large action models).
Agents help facilitate multi-modal conversational suite experiences for users. For instance, the Bryte Recruiter Agent can help write job descriptions with the Job Genius feature, create, and execute outreach campaigns, match, and surface best-fit candidates, generate interview guides, schedule candidate interviews, provide interview intelligence, and auto-tag “silver medalist” talent to track in the future.
These tasks would have taken the recruiter days if not weeks to complete. The agent completes the tasks in minutes by maneuvering through preauthorized and authenticated application workflows. This is a perfect example of making complex things simpler.
Combined with Industry Pre-trained Models, UKG AI solutions will go beyond the domain personas to create models that are purpose-built for deep vertical-specific functionality, driving efficiencies, and addressing complex use cases.
Industry/Vertical Pre-trained Models
Bryte AI is embedded throughout the UKG Pro and UKG Ready suites to help all employees, whether frontline or knowledge workers, accomplish more during the flow of everyday work.
Training and tuning the models on an industry-specific segment makes the model more accurate, addresses unconscious bias, and eschews false responses or hallucinations. The ontologies result in shorter training duration and a foundational pillar to deploy tenant level micro LLMs. These pre-trained models can operate independently through an API or accessed through a chatbot or a role-based copilot.
The UKG dataset, that spans over 80 thousand organizations around the world, will fuel their Connected Agents and Industry/Vertical Pre-trained Models giving their customers unique advantages to gain efficiencies and foster innovation through hyper-personalized, contextualized frictionless experiences for their employees, managers, and HR and payroll practitioners and leaders.
My Take
UKG is delivering on what they have been showing us on their roadmap which is very good news (not all software vendors can do this). What we are seeing now is refinement in the product - it is excellent that many of these additions have come directly from their customers - it shows that UKG is listening to its users and is open to suggestions for improvement.
UKG is doing GenAI differently capitalizing on our unique datasets in work (WFM) and culture (Great Place To Work) data and extending GenAI throughout the entire product suite. It is great to see UKG Bryte in a controlled release with much more innovation coming quickly.
It is awesome to see UKG’s focus on the frontline workforce to help them improve their worklife.
Great Place To Work Hub is live and it’s exciting to see clients are now embracing this unique offering.
Their multi-country pay solution One View Connect is live and serving customers and will soon be included in UKG Ready - the global payroll problem is a big one and its good to see that UKG is tackling it head-on.
UKG’s strategy of having an offering specific to Small Businesses rather than forcing a complex solution down to this type of business makes a lot of sense. This strategy allows for quick implementation allowing this size of business to quickly reap the benefits of having an HCM and WFM solution.
There is a lot going on at UKG and as I have already said, it is encouraging to see them deliver in so many areas.
