My new book is here

Jun 05, 2025 11:10 am

Hi, it's been too long!

And yes, that's me, not you!

I was writing a new book, and I took some time off to do just that. And with conference season starting up and keynotes in several countries, I just did not find the time to write the newsletter. I promise I will do better!

My new book is called: "What's Up With My Pay?" It's focused on helping graduates to understand pay & perks and their payslip. I wrote it because I discovered that young people have no idea how compensation is set. So this is a no-nonsense guide with

Clear explanations of how pay really works.
Practical tips to negotiate the salary you deserve.
Insights into the future of pay and what it means for YOU.

It's the perfect graduation gift, and the book might help if you're negotiating a new job offer!

Should you outsource payroll or keep it in-house? Join me, EX3 and SAP Successfactors on July 1st. We're also going to discuss what a modern payroll platform looks like, and how you can confidently migrate. Sign up here.

My friend Stacey Harris at Sapient Insight has launched the 28th(!) HR Systems Survey. If you've never participated, you should absolutely do so. It's the oldest and most trustworthy HR Tech survey in the industry. Last year, 3,318 unique organizations participated with 59 countries represented.

👉 Click here to take the survey now and make your voice count. Did I mention you receive a free copy of the full report?

UKG Analyst Day 2025: All in on the platform

I was invited to attend UKG's Analyst day. I appreciated the opportunity to meet UKG's leadership team and hear about product updates (delivered and planned). If you don't want to read the whole story (even though you really should...) here's the short version:

TL;DR UKG's May 2025 analyst gathering showcased a company in transformation, moving decisively toward becoming an AI-powered workforce operating platform while maintaining its foundational strength in serving frontline workers. Under the leadership of CEO Jennifer Morgan, UKG is executing a focused strategy that leverages its unique position as the only major HCM provider purpose-built for the 80% of the workforce that doesn't sit behind a desk.

Bottom Line: UKG's commitment to frontline-first design philosophy, combined with AI agent deployment and global payroll expansion, positions the company to capture international market share as organizations seek unified workforce solutions that serve their entire employee base, not just knowledge workers.

A platform shift — not just in tech, but in mindset

UKG has always built solutions for frontline workers. That’s not new. But in a world where 80% of the global workforce is frontline, I always wonder why so many HR vendors still build for desk-based workers first and treat this deskless segment like a feature request. UKG has made it the foundation. Scheduling, pay, engagement, compliance: it all starts with the people who don’t sit at a desk all day. And this year, that message came through louder than ever.

All in: Customers first

Rather than treating the frontline as an afterthought, UKG’s platform strategy begins with this worker and extends outward. From how people are scheduled and paid to how they’re engaged, retained, and supported. This customer-first mindset shows up across the entire journey—from sales to ongoing support. CEO Jennifer Morgan opened the day with something that stuck with me: "Frontline employees are the face of the brand to customers... UKG thinks differently about frontline workers." And you know what? That’s not an empty promise. While everyone else is obsessing over knowledge worker productivity (and trying to replace them with AI), UKG is building a platform that truly gets what it means to manage a retail workforce, healthcare staff, or manufacturing teams. Yes, they are incorporating AI, but with a focus to make everyone’s life easier, including employees. Jennifer Morgan and new Chief Product Officer Suresh Vittal emphasized that UKG is “all-in” on delivering measurable outcomes to this customer base.

A clear theme from the event was UKG’s focus on customer-driven innovation. The leadership team has been out talking to customers to better understand these businesses and their challenges. This is always important, but especially when a vendor’s leadership team is changing as much as UKG’s has in the last eighteen months. As part of the refocus on the customer, Jennifer Morgan highlighted the launch of the Customer Experience Center(CEC) which proactively monitors incidents, feedback, and performance across all touchpoints, so that all UKG teams have a single view of the customer.

The AI-first workforce operating platform

What’s shifting is not just the product, it’s also the positioning. UKG is no longer an HCM vendor (formerly Ultimate Software) with workforce management (formerly Kronos) and global payroll (formerly Immedis). These products are evolving into a unified AI-first workforce operating platform. This isn’t semantics. It’s a strategic redesign that brings payroll, scheduling, compliance, and engagement into one operating fabric—especially for companies built around frontline labor. It’s also a crucial step in unifying the company’s vision, both internally and externally, after a period of mergers and acquisitions.

This requires an internal mindset shift, in product and engineering, as well as culture. And that is reflected in a substantial leadership transformation. They've established a new Global Leadership Team (GLT), half of whom are new to the company. The aim is to empower the GLT to move faster and break down the silos that were slowing them down. The cultural shift from "many shiny objects" to focused execution is exactly what UKG needed.

Jennifer Morgan also reaffirmed UKG’s goal of double-digit growth, with global expansion and the partner ecosystem playing key roles. While this focus makes sense and supports UKG’s long-term goals, there wasn’t much detail shared yet—it felt more like a reinforcement of existing plans than a fresh announcement. That said, UKG has an opportunity to raise its profile internationally, where it’s mainly known for its WFM capabilities and brand visibility of HCM and payroll remains relatively low. Strengthening global awareness could help accelerate growth in key markets.

Why frontline focus matters so much

This is where I get a bit passionate, because I think the industry has had this completely backwards for too long. Most HR Tech was (and continues to be!) designed for knowledge workers, the 20% who already have decent tools. Meanwhile, the 80% who interact with customers daily are often stuck with systems that were designed for desk-based workers by people who've never worked a retail shift or managed a hospital floor. The experience is completely different when designing for a desktop compared to mobile-first. And for too long, deskless workers had to make do with a simplified variation of the desktop build, offering less functionality.

UKG gets this in their DNA, having purpose-built industry specific workforce solutions. Whether it's retail, manufacturing, healthcare, public service, or logistics, UKG’s products reflect the complexity and regulatory nuance of hourly, distributed, and shift-based environments on a global scale. When they demo scheduling features, you can tell they understand that a retail associate's availability isn't the same as a health practitioner's calendar. When they talk about compliance, they know that getting payroll wrong for a frontline worker means they can't pay rent. It's so much more than an administrative inconvenience. The use cases presented, e.g. a gym owner completing several tasks to keep her business running, reflected this deep experience and knowledge.

The research they shared really drives this home: 61% of manufacturers and 85% of retailers are dealing with labor shortages. These aren't abstract workforce planning challenges: they are existential business problems because it means a business owner can’t staff their front desk. UKG is one of the few vendors actually building solutions from this perspective.

No more home page

UKG is launching a new era of AI-first workforce automation built on a foundational layer called Flex Platform. Bryte AI agents and the FleX AI Orchestrator are designed to take care of repetitive tasks, support better decision-making, and even work on their own in some cases. What makes UKG’s approach stand out is that their AI isn’t one-size-fits-all. Instead of jumping on the AI hype train with chatbots and copilots like everyone else, they're taking a measured approach and building something more substantial. They start from the vision that the future worker will have no homepage (which I’ve been advocating for years). The UI will be as simple as the ask or the task and offer a conversational experience. A worker starts a task or returns to their last stated task in a working space, that can be anything as well as multi-modal.

UKG will make agents available “out of the box” trained on UKG’s vertical domain expertise using the data available in the secure data fabric layer called FleX People Fabric. Customers can further train and extend these agents with additional (internal) data. That means they’re not just copilots; they can complete complex, multi-step tasks. Self-scheduling, live accrual updates, and onboarding nudges are being tested in real customer environments.

UKG’s Bryte AI agents are already in production with selected customers. These are not demos, not pilots, but running workloads and providing live feedback. We will hear more about these experiences at UKG Aspire in November 2025. The focus is on Moments that Matter (One Suite Experience) to deliver AI in the flow of work.

UKG knows their data advantage is in the depth and specificity of workforce knowledge. Their AI is trained on decades of frontline labor and workforce insights — which gives it an edge when it comes to scheduling, compliance, and workforce planning. In addition to the aforementioned data, UKG also has industry-leading data from Great Place to Work, giving it unparalleled insights to help companies build stronger and more engaged workplace cultures.

Bring your own (global) payroll

In 2023, UKG acquired Immedis, but it has been relatively quiet on the global payroll front. With One View Direct, global payroll is finally getting the spotlight it deserves. UKG posits that most global payroll leaders don't have payroll backgrounds; they're trying to manage complexity they don't fully understand, while juggling multiple vendors and compliance requirements. They desperately need unified data and insights as well as compliance, but these companies aren’t going to rip and replace their entire payroll infrastructure to make it happen. UKG's "bring your own payroll" approach in One View Direct acknowledges this reality. By letting organizations keep their existing providers while layering on UKG's compliance intelligence and unified reporting, they're solving the actual problem instead of trying to force an idealistic solution. UKG’s One View is shaping up to be a serious contender for companies managing complex, multi-country payrolls—especially combined with the new managed services strategy that layers in AI to reduce support needs.

The integration between HCM, WFM and payroll is shaping up. UKG has expanded UKG Ready with native payroll capabilities that cover Canada. For the UK, they’ve added payroll (through Staffology). This clearly underscores the importance of integrated payroll, especially for this type of workforce.

They’re also making moves in France, aiming for compliance readiness in Q3 2025. These aren’t symbolic checkboxes; UKG is solving hard problems, country by country. The One View platform now includes an integrated payment model (FX) as well as managed services supported by Bryte AI to reduce payroll errors and support calls.

UKG has real potential for international growth—especially if it can nail seamless integration. The market is moving toward unified HCM and payroll platforms, and UKG’s strength in workforce management gives it a special advantage, particularly in highly regulated companies in regions like Europe. But to fully capitalize on that, UKG needs to show up as a truly integrated suite—and there’s room to improve on that front. The move to deliver a workforce platform is a great step.

Product evolution that matters

The Ready platform continues to impress. Instead of treating it as a "lite" version of UKG Pro, UKG is building features that make sense for smaller, less complex organizations. Key roadmap capabilities include a Paycheck AI Agent to help employees better understand their pay, and an AI-powered accrual management for policy-driven automation — both scheduled for delivery in Q3. That's solving real pain points for companies that don't have armies of payroll professionals.

On the Pro side, the FleX Compose low-code tools will be a significant game-changer if UKG delivers on the promise. These no/low code tools combined with Bryte AI will allow business users and developers to configure and automate UKG Pro to meet unique business needs. Most HCM customization requires external consulting engagements or complex development work. If UKG can democratize that through point-and-click workflow building, it can change the economics of platform configuration.

The Benefits Hub evolution with enrollment agents is another example of practical AI application. Benefits enrollment is painful for everyone involved: employees don't understand their options, HR teams get swamped with questions, and mistakes are costly. Automating the guidance could be a huge win. A benefit modeling agent who models the costs for new plans or changing personal circumstances could make life easier for many.

What's still out

The transformation into a true workforce platform company is ambitious, and Suresh Vittal was clear about it being a "half-decade journey." That's a long time in tech years, and execution will be everything. UKG needs to show concrete ROI from these AI investments, not just cool demos. I’m hoping we’ll see some customers on stage at UKG Aspire 2025 in November to share their feedback on adoption.

UKG also mentioned that they want to create a relationship with the worker, not just with the employer. As many of these workers move between UKG customers, that’s understandable. Instead of creating a worker profile in different customer environments, you can create it just once. When the worker switches, personal work preferences are kept. And while maintaining worker preferences across employers sounds great in theory, the consent and data protection requirements could be complex, especially in regulated industries. If UKG can get this right (set the standard for consent-first worker-centric data), they’ll turn a challenge into a competitive advantage. If they don’t, this will become a risk fast.

Reintroducing UKG to the world

Speaking about meeting evolving business needs, Chief Marketing Officer Sarah Hodges spoke about reintroducing UKG to the world, with a focus on:

The escalating global labor deficit
The need for improved employee experience
The democratization of AI

As companies are dealing with labor shortages, most employees (62%) are not engaged. 75% of front-line employees feel burnout and 46% are tempted to quit. This means it’s even more important that organizations understand the connection between schedule and pay and integrate it with plan and engage. Using the Great Place to Work data throughout the suites can provide some much-needed guidance and best practices, especially in companies that don’t have the size to employ dedicated HR business partners. This means that the UKG brand will evolve to reflect three objectives: outcome-driven, customer-centric, and globally recognized, as Go-to-Market President Rachel Barger stated. Getting this messaging right will be crucial as they expand globally and compete with better-known enterprise and local brands.

UKG is expanding its global partner ecosystem under the leadership of its first Chief Partner Officer, Jay Dettling. The ServiceNow partnership is a clever example of how UKG is expanding its footprint. ServiceNow owns the enterprise IT conversation and powers many HR service centers, but they don’t have functionality aimed at frontline workers. UKG owns the frontline relationship but needs enterprise integration. This partnership could be a smart way to finally bridge the gap between frontline operations and enterprise IT. It's a natural fit that could open doors that neither company could reach alone. This is also true from a business perspective, where UKG is more attached to the line of business, and ServiceNow to the CIO/CTO pillar.

My bottom line

UKG is doing something that sets them apart from most of their competitors. They're actually solving problems for the 80% of the workforce that works in the frontline every single day. UKG has stayed focused on the fundamental challenge of managing these workers effectively. This focus has been and will be their strength. It’s also a diverse customer base with very specific needs and requirements, sometimes up to the individual company.

The combination of new leadership energy, practical AI deployment, and global expansion capabilities positions them well. But what I really value is their commitment to solving problems for companies with frontline workers. In a world where labor shortages are hitting customer-facing roles hardest, having technology that's purpose-built for those workers isn't just nice to have, it's a competitive necessity. And combined with the insights from Great Place to Work, you can level up engagement, too.

If you're evaluating workforce solutions and more than half your employees don't work behind a desk all day, UKG should be at the top of your list. They understand your workers because they've been building for them from day one, not retrofitting knowledge worker tools to pretend they work for everyone. And the good thing? What works for deskless workers will work for their desk-based colleagues as well.

UKG is focused on getting the fundamentals right for the people who show up, in person, every day. This frontline-first philosophy, combined with a push into AI and platform capabilities, positions UKG as a company to watch. Its strategic direction aligns closely with market needs, especially as more organizations recognize that workforce productivity efforts must extend beyond knowledge workers. With a deep understanding of frontline challenges, a clear execution strategy, and continued global expansion, UKG is well-positioned to lead the next evolution of workforce technology. If UKG can achieve its goals, 2025 could be the year it redefines what a workforce platform really means.

Full disclosure: UKG reimbursed my travel expenses, but did not compensate me for writing this article. UKG representatives were permitted to review the content for factual accuracy and clarification purposes only; they did not have final approval or editorial control.

Hope you enjoyed the newsletter!

Have a great day, Anita

How to get in touch with me

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