In a move that signals a major shift in how organizations will manage their workforces, UKG and Google Cloud have announced a sweeping expansion of their partnership that promises to bring sophisticated agentic AI capabilities to tens of millions of workers worldwide. This isn’t just another tech collaboration — it’s a fundamental reimagining of how AI can transform the daily experience of employees, managers, and HR professionals alike.
A Partnership Built for the AI Era
The announcement, revealed this week, positions Google Cloud as UKG’s primary provider for AI and data analytics. UKG is an industry leader in HR, pay and workforce management, serving over 80,000 organizations across 150 countries. From scheduling shifts at retail stores to processing payroll for global enterprises, UKG’s platforms touch the working lives of tens of millions of people every single day.
By selecting Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise, Gemini models, and BigQuery as the foundation for its AI strategy, UKG is making a bold bet on agentic AI — intelligent systems that don’t just respond to queries but can autonomously handle complex tasks and make decisions on behalf of users.
“Our expanded partnership with Google Cloud builds on the power of UKG’s Workforce Operating Platform, to bring customers a broad range of solutions that drive efficiency and deliver insights that help leaders focus on what matters, their workforce and their business,” said Jennifer Morgan, CEO of UKG.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, emphasized the significance of the collaboration: “Through our expanded strategic partnership with UKG, we will help organizations use Gemini Enterprise and our AI to leverage workplace data insights in new and more meaningful ways. Our work together will allow businesses to build and deploy sophisticated AI-powered applications that optimize workflows and improve employee experiences.”
Michael Rochelle, Chief Strategy Officer and Principal Analyst at Brandon Hall Group, sees this partnership as a pivotal moment for the HR technology industry: “The convergence of UKG’s deep workforce insights with Google Cloud’s advanced AI capabilities represents a significant leap forward in how organizations support and empower their people. What’s particularly noteworthy is the focus on agentic AI that doesn’t just provide information but takes action. This moves us beyond the era of AI-assisted decision-making into AI-enabled workforce excellence. Organizations that embrace these capabilities early will gain a substantial competitive advantage in attracting, retaining, and helping their people thrive.”
The Rise of AI Agents in the Workplace
What sets this partnership apart is its focus on agentic AI — autonomous agents that can understand context, make decisions, and take actions without constant human supervision. UKG is developing three categories of AI agents that address critical pain points across the employee lifecycle:
24/7 Employee Assistance: Imagine never having to wait for HR to respond to your questions about benefits or not having to navigate through multiple systems just to swap a shift. The new AI agents will provide always-on, self-service assistance for common workplace needs. Employees will be able to check schedules, swap shifts, and get real-time answers about pay or benefits whenever they need them — at 2 PM or 2 AM.
Manager Insights: For managers drowning in administrative tasks and spreadsheets, these agents promise to be game changers. By handling complex data analysis autonomously, they’ll eliminate administrative bottlenecks and simplify workforce planning. Instead of spending hours analyzing overtime trends or trying to improve shift coverage, managers can ask simple questions in natural language and receive sophisticated analyses with actionable recommendations. The example UKG provides is telling: a manager will be able to use conversational AI to simply ask, “Show me my team’s overtime trends and recommend three strategies to reduce burnout risk.” In seconds, the platform will deliver a custom analysis with actionable recommendations, enabling leaders to turn complex data into informed business strategies.
HR and Admin Optimization: Behind every smooth-running organization is a team of HR professionals and system administrators handling compliance tracking, payroll administration, and report generation. The new AI agents will automate many of these critical but time-consuming backend processes, reducing manual effort and ensuring data accuracy across organizations.
Breaking Down Silos with Agent2Agent Protocol
One of the most forward-thinking aspects of this partnership is UKG’s commitment to the Agent2Agent (A2A) interoperability protocol. In simple terms, this means that UKG’s AI agents won’t just work within UKG’s ecosystem — they’ll be able to communicate and collaborate with any other A2A-compatible agents, regardless of the provider.
This is crucial because most organizations operate with a diverse technology stack spanning multiple platforms for different business functions. By supporting A2A, UKG is helping ensure that customers won’t face a future where their AI agents exist in isolated silos, unable to work together. It’s a customer-friendly approach that future-proofs AI investments and acknowledges the reality of how modern organizations actually work.
Walking the Walk: Internal Adoption
What makes this announcement particularly compelling is UKG’s commitment to using the technology internally first — demonstrating genuine confidence in the partnership’s capabilities. UKG will be one of the first organizations to deploy Gemini Enterprise for its own global workforce, equipping teams from sales and engineering to customer support with centralized agentic AI and enterprise search capabilities.
This means UKG employees will have instant access to critical information like software documentation and customer service case histories. They’ll also be able to build custom agents to automate workflows like client call preparation. This internal deployment serves as both a proving ground for the technology and a powerful signal of confidence in the partnership.
The Technical Foundation: More Than Just Buzzwords
While AI agents grab the headlines, the partnership’s technical infrastructure is equally impressive. UKG will leverage BigQuery and AlloyDB to provide customers with unified, real-time access to their workforce data through secure, zero-copy integration. This isn’t just about storing data — it’s about making it genuinely useful.
Organizations will be able to analyze UKG People Fabric data alongside other enterprise data sets, generating deeper insights by correlating workforce trends with key business outcomes. Want to understand how employee satisfaction scores relate to customer satisfaction metrics? Or how overtime patterns correlate with quality issues in manufacturing? This unified data foundation makes those analyses possible.
This same data infrastructure also powers the user experience in Gemini Enterprise, giving joint customers a single destination to connect, view, and search their enterprise data — no more jumping between systems or reconciling conflicting reports.
A True Two-Way Partnership
What makes this collaboration particularly interesting is that it’s genuinely reciprocal. While UKG is adopting Google Cloud’s AI technologies, Google is simultaneously expanding its usage of UKG Pro for payroll and global workforce management. Google will leverage UKG’s Bryte AI-powered features to boost productivity and gain workforce insights for multi-country payroll, employee scheduling, and long-term planning.
This mutual adoption creates aligned incentives and ensures both companies have skin in the game when it comes to making the integration work seamlessly.
What This Means for Customers
The partnership includes a joint go-to-market strategy designed to provide businesses with cohesive, expert guidance from initial project evaluation through implementation and ongoing support. Additionally, UKG will launch on Google Cloud Marketplace this fall with UKG Pro Workforce Management, offering customers a simplified procurement path that leverages their existing Google Cloud commitments.
The new integrations across BigQuery and the AI agents are expected to be available in 2026, giving organizations time to prepare their infrastructure and plan their adoption strategies.
The Bigger Picture
This partnership represents more than just a business deal — it’s a vision of how AI will transform the employee experience at scale. Rather than replacing human judgment, these AI agents promise to handle the routine, the repetitive, and the time-consuming, freeing up humans to focus on strategy, creativity, and the interpersonal aspects of work that require empathy and emotional intelligence.
For frontline workers, it means more autonomy and immediate access to information. For managers, it means less time on administrative tasks and more time leading their teams. For HR professionals, it means the ability to focus on strategic initiatives rather than getting bogged down in operational details.
As organizations navigate the ongoing transformation of work — remote and hybrid arrangements, the war for talent, the need for agility in an uncertain economy — having intelligent systems that can help streamline workforce operations becomes not just nice to have, but essential.
The UKG and Google Cloud partnership demonstrates that the future of work won’t be about humans versus machines, but rather about humans augmented by intelligent agents that dramatically enhance productivity and transform how work gets done. And with 80,000 organizations already trusting UKG’s platforms, this vision has the scale to become reality for millions of workers around the world.
