At UKG Aspire 2025 in Las Vegas, UKG unveiled a variety of groundbreaking innovations designed to transform how organizations manage their workforce, with a particular focus on frontline employees who represent nearly 80% of the global workforce. From AI-powered intelligence hubs to innovative recognition platforms, these announcements demonstrate UKG’s commitment to creating a more intelligent, connected, and employee-centric future of work with their Workforce Operating Platform.
Workforce Intelligence Hub: Your Operational Command Center
UKG unveiled the Workforce Intelligence Hub, a first-of-its-kind AI-driven solution that unifies all workforce information, from employee schedules and time tracking to hiring, performance, pay, and industry trends, into one real-time view. This represents a fundamental shift in how organizations can understand and optimize their workforce operations.
The Workforce Intelligence Hub serves as an operational command center, giving executives and managers unprecedented access to the labor insights they need to make better, faster decisions about staffing, productivity, and organizational efficiency. Rather than piecing together data from disparate systems, leaders can now see a complete, unified picture of their workforce in real time.
The agentic platform delivers critical capabilities across three key areas and uses AI agents to make changes that positively influence business outcomes in real-time. It provides demand forecasting that predicts staffing needs based on historical data, business trends, and external factors like seasonality, ensuring the right people are in the right place at the right time while reducing costs and improving service delivery. It detects overtime trends and anomalies by identifying unexpected spikes or patterns in overtime usage, preventing excessive labor costs and proactively flagging potential compliance risks early. And it offers real-time visibility into shift coverage and labor gaps, helping managers rebalance workloads and reduce overtime costs.
Built on the world’s largest collection of workforce data, the hub delivers critical benchmarks to understand how the organization is performing, insights that explain what’s happening and why, and AI-driven actions to trigger changes across UKG and third-party systems in response to evolving conditions. According to Suresh Vittal, Chief Product Officer at UKG, “The Workforce Intelligence Hub provides customers with a complete view of their operation, enabling the faster, data-driven decisions that today’s business environment demands.”
Transforming Real-Time Labor and Staffing Strategies
UKG announced two innovative agentic applications designed to help organizations transform daily operations: UKG Rapid Hire and Dynamic Labor Management. These solutions address two of the most pressing challenges organizations face: hiring quickly enough to meet demand and managing labor in real time as conditions change.
These two intelligent solutions close the gap between planning and action, uncover staffing issues as they happen, and make frontline hiring as simple as ordering a rideshare. This consumer-app simplicity applied to workforce management represents a fundamental rethinking of how hiring and scheduling should work.
UKG Rapid Hire streamlines the frontline hiring process, recognizing that in industries like retail, hospitality, and healthcare, the ability to hire quickly can mean the difference between meeting customer demand and falling short. By simplifying and accelerating hiring workflows, organizations can fill positions faster and reduce the operational disruption caused by understaffing.
Dynamic Labor Management takes workforce optimization to the next level by providing real-time visibility and control over labor deployment. Rather than relying on static schedules created days or weeks in advance, organizations can now respond dynamically to changing conditions, unexpected callouts, and fluctuating demand. This agility reduces labor costs while improving service levels and employee satisfaction.
Together, these solutions represent UKG’s vision for eliminating the traditional lag between recognizing a staffing need and addressing it. In today’s fast-paced business environment, organizations can’t afford to wait — and with these new capabilities, they won’t have to.
Industry-First Network for the Frontline Workforce
In what may be the most socially significant announcement, UKG unveiled a first-to-market, AI-led experience focusing on frontline employees that connects them with a curated network of services and partners focused on supporting their wealth, health, and everyday essentials. This network addresses a critical gap in how organizations support their frontline workers.
Early collaborators include Chime, TurboTax, and OnePay, with additional providers to be announced in the first half of 2026. The network recognizes that frontline employees face unique financial and logistical challenges that traditional workplace benefits don’t always address effectively.
According to a recent UKG global study of 8,200 frontline workers, nearly half believe their organization has two cultures: one for knowledge workers who can enjoy perks like remote work and unlimited time-off; and one for frontline workers, who make up nearly 80% of the global workforce and must be present to do their jobs. This stark finding underscores the importance of creating dedicated solutions that acknowledge and address the distinct needs of frontline employees.
By connecting frontline workers with financial services, tax assistance, and payment solutions through an AI-powered interface, UKG is helping organizations demonstrate genuine commitment to supporting all employees, not just those in traditional office roles. This network approach creates a more equitable workplace experience and helps frontline workers navigate the financial complexities of their lives more easily. UKG also said it is actively exploring partners for both individual and group transportation support, with an eye on changing how organizations can help their frontline employees overcome the logistical challenge of getting to and from work.
UKG Bryte AI: Eliminating the Search for Information
One of the most universal workplace frustrations is the endless hunt for information: clicking through intranets, searching policy handbooks, and trying to remember which system houses which document. UKG unveiled a next-generation approach to operations and employee relations, leveraging its powerful UKG Bryte AI.
Building on nearly two decades of success with the UKG People Assist and UKG Document Manager solutions, UKG has infused agentic artificial intelligence (AI) throughout its solutions to help organizations dramatically reduce two of the most common questions from employees: “How do I…?” and “Where do I find….?”
The transformation is remarkable in its simplicity. With the new AI-first People Assist, employees simply ask a question in conversational format, such as “How do I request parental leave?” or “How do I update my 401 (k) contribution?”, and instantly get clear, personalized guidance with prompts to kick off the process.
Optimized for mobile so that employees can get access anywhere, at any time, the AI experiences in UKG People Assist and UKG Document Manager maximize the power of UKG’s unified People Fabric data layer. People Fabric helps UKG customers by allowing each organization to train UKG Bryte AI on any work-related process and policy, extending well beyond HR to encompass many aspects of operations and procedures.
Coupled with the world’s largest collection of work and sentiment data, this allows UKG to deliver hyper-personalized answers in real-time that are contextualized to their role and situation, making information quicker to access and easier to understand. According to Suresh Vittal, “Finding answers and documents at work should feel effortless, allowing people to quickly get the information they need to do their job, make decisions, and have an impact.”
UKG Beacon: Intelligent Recognition for Small and Mid-sized Businesses
UKG announced the launch of UKG Beacon, a groundbreaking solution that transforms how small and mid-sized businesses engage, recognize, and retain their workforce. This announcement is particularly significant because it brings easy-to-use enterprise-grade employee engagement capabilities to organizations that historically haven’t had access to such sophisticated tools.
UKG Beacon embeds Mo, an award-winning employee recognition and culture-building platform recently acquired by UKG, into UKG Ready’s comprehensive workforce data to deliver intelligent, data-driven employee engagement. This creates something entirely new: a recognition system that doesn’t just facilitate appreciation but actively suggests the right moments and methods for recognition.
UKG Beacon is available immediately and provides three powerful capabilities. It offers real-time achievement recognition, fueled by workforce data in UKG Ready, where UKG Beacon can prompt managers to send immediate recognition or automated rewards to frontline employees during key moments to celebrate. The combination of scheduling data and sentiment analysis allows UKG Beacon to proactively suggest actions and activities for employees through predictive engagement nudges. And when an employee completes a project or task milestone, UKG Beacon will recommend acknowledgement that resonates most with each individual, such as private thanks over public kudos, increasing its effectiveness through personalized, preference-based acknowledgement.
According to Chris Kiklas, GVP and General Manager of UKG Ready, “By combining Mo’s innovative recognition technology with UKG Ready’s robust workforce analytics, UKG Beacon represents a quantum leap forward in employee engagement for the small business and mid-sized market. We’re helping customers simplify work, celebrate their people in the moment, and build cultures where performance and purpose go hand-in-hand.”
The Bigger Picture: AI-Powered, People-First Workforce Management
These five announcements, all revealed at UKG Aspire 2025, paint a compelling picture of where workforce management is headed. The common thread running through each innovation is the combination of artificial intelligence, real-time data, and a genuine focus on improving experiences for all workers, from the C-suite to the frontline.
UKG is positioning itself as a leading global AI platform unifying HR, pay, and workforce management, with solutions built on the world’s largest collection of workforce data, using its people-first approach to AI. This data advantage, combined with sophisticated AI capabilities, enables UKG to deliver insights and automation that would be impossible with smaller datasets or less advanced technology.
What’s particularly notable about these announcements is the focus on democratizing access to advanced capabilities with a clear and consistent emphasis on frontline work. The Workforce Intelligence Hub gives all organizations, not just large enterprises, access to sophisticated analytics. UKG Beacon brings intelligent recognition to small and mid-sized businesses. The Frontline Worker Network acknowledges and addresses the needs of workers who have historically been underserved by technology.
For HR leaders, these innovations offer a path forward in an increasingly complex environment. Labor shortages, retention challenges, compliance requirements, and the need for operational agility aren’t going away. But with the right tools (technologies that combine human insight with artificial intelligence, that work in real time rather than looking backward, and that serve all employees rather than just some), organizations can navigate these challenges successfully.
As the workplace continues to evolve, one thing is clear: the future belongs to organizations that can harness data, deploy AI thoughtfully, and keep the frontline workforce – often the largest, most expensive, and most complex part of any operation – at the center of everything they do. With these five major announcements, UKG is showing the path forward.
