When UKG invited global analysts to Las Vegas for its annual Aspire conference, the message was unmistakable from the opening moments: This is a company on a mission to transform how organizations manage, optimize, and support the 80% of the global workforce that doesn’t sit behind a desk.
Over two days of intensive briefings, CEO Jennifer Morgan and her leadership team laid out an ambitious strategy that positions UKG as the definitive Workforce Operating Platform for the frontline economy, key verticals, small and medium-sized businesses, as well as enterprise organizations.
The scale of UKG’s ambition is matched only by the sophistication of their strategy — a company charting a course from $5 billion to $10 billion in annual revenue, powered by a four-pillar strategy that weaves together AI innovation, platform architecture, ecosystem partnerships, and an unwavering focus on customer co-innovation.
What emerged from these sessions was a portrait of a company that understands both the technological imperatives of the AI era and the human realities of workforce management, especially for the frontline.
Strategic Foundation: Values and Pillars Driving Transformation
Morgan has positioned UKG for a transformative next era with a strategic emphasis on the company’s Innovation Engine, raising the bar in customer experience and operational excellence. The company has established a clear organizational framework built around five core values that guide daily operations: Customers First, Own It, Think Big, Integrity Always, and One Team.
These values translate into specific behavioral expectations, emphasizing that the company puts customers at the center of decision-making, maintains accountability, pursues ambitious goals, operates with integrity, and fosters collaborative teamwork.
Morgan’s strategic priorities are organized around four key pillars: Growth and Customer Loyalty, Innovation, Operational Excellence, and Focus on What Matters Most. Supporting these priorities are three foundational tenets that define how UKG operates on a daily basis: Collaboration, Speed, and Accountability. This structured approach provides clarity for both employees and stakeholders regarding the company’s direction.
The transition to a platform company represents UKG’s most significant strategic evolution. The company is moving from offering HR, payroll, and workforce management systems to delivering a unified Workforce Operating Platform that enables organizations to see, decide, and act in real time, with an emphasis on the frontline workforce. This shift transforms UKG from a “system of record” into a “system of action” that drives measurable business outcomes.
UKG’s corporate strategy also rests on four interconnected pillars that reinforce each other in powerful ways:
- AI and Platform Strategy, which unifies data within its People Fabric, a unified data structure, and commercializes it through the newly launched Workforce Intelligence Hub. This represents a shift from managing frontline workforce operations to monetizing workforce intelligence at scale, though the pricing strategy is still evolving.
- The App Strategy scales innovation through both organic development and strategic acquisitions, including capabilities in high-volume frontline recruiting through the recently acquired Chattr (now branded UKG Rapid Hire), highly regulated industry scheduling through Shiftboard, and employee recognition through UKG Beacon, born out of the recent acquisition of Mo, an award-winning employee recognition and culture-building platform.
- The Ecosystem Strategy expands reach through curated partnerships and the newly launched UKG Frontline Worker Network, delivering frontline wellness, financial, and health solutions to employees.
- The Customer Co-Innovation pillar ensures that AI-driven capabilities are developed directly with customers to deliver practical, real-world outcomes centered on the frontline workforce rather than theoretical possibilities.
The leadership team includes Arlen Shenkman as President and Chief Financial Officer, suggesting a strong financial operations focus alongside the strategic vision articulated by Morgan.
Frontline Focus: Deep Vertical Expertise Creates Competitive Advantage
A notable aspect of UKG’s market positioning is its explicit focus on serving as “the champion of the frontline worker.”
This positioning is significant from a competitive standpoint, as it differentiates UKG in the human capital management market by specifically targeting organizations with substantial frontline workforce populations, such as those in retail, healthcare, hospitality, field services, and manufacturing sectors.
The company’s Innovation Engine appears designed to address the unique needs of these workers and their employers, potentially creating a defensible market niche.
The focus on frontline workers runs through every aspect of UKG’s strategy. With 80% of the global workforce operating on the frontline in industries like healthcare, retail, manufacturing, hospitality, and public sector organizations, UKG has built deep vertical expertise. The company serves 71% of Fortune 1000 healthcare organizations, 77% in retail, and 67% in manufacturing. This market leadership gives UKG unparalleled workforce data and industry-specific insights that feed their AI models and product development.
Vertical specialization enables UKG to deliver solutions tailored to specific industry needs, which gives them a competitive advantage. Healthcare gets strategic workforce planning that forecasts patient volumes and acuity. Retail receives schedule-to-skill matching that aligns talent with demand. And manufacturing benefits from specialized scheduling for complex regulatory environments.
Recent acquisitions of Mo (UKG Beacon), Shiftboard (for heavily regulated industries like the energy sector), and Chattr (UKG Rapid Hire) strengthen UKG’s vertical market capabilities, particularly in healthcare, retail, and manufacturing sectors.
The Power of People Fabric: Foundation for Intelligence
People Fabric, the consistent, governed data layer that standardizes people, work, and culture data across the entire suite, is the foundation that enables everything else UKG is building. People Fabric ensures that every product, every partner integration and every AI model operates on the same trusted information.
Chief Technology Officer Jim Joudrey highlighted that UKG operates at significant scale, processing over 30 billion frontline interactions, 10 billion punches, 12 billion schedules, and calculating over $1 trillion in payroll across 850+ industries, 150 countries, and 80,000 organizations. People Fabric functions as more than a data lake, serving as a canonical data engine with high-volume ingestion, low-latency access, powerful analytics, and real-time third-party integration capabilities.
Chief Product Officer Suresh Vittal emphasized that the foundation of the unified Workforce Operating Platform is People Fabric, a sophisticated data engine that unifies workforce data across dimensions, including diversity, skills, schedules, pay, performance, and culture, powering the Workforce Intelligence Hub that delivers insights, access to actions, and industry benchmarks through APIs, webhooks, and orchestration tools.
The Workforce Operating Platform architecture layers on top of People Fabric to deliver three core capabilities. At the base sits People Fabric itself, collecting and unifying data from HR, Workforce Management (WFM), Pay, and third-party systems.
The middle layer delivers Workforce Intelligence, providing experiences, orchestration, insights, benchmarks, and the ability to trigger actions across systems. The top layer is People-First AI, which offers Assistants (AI that helps users complete tasks) and Agents (AI that autonomously executes multi-step processes) across HR, WFM, and Pay functions.
This architecture enables cross-suite workflows that were previously impossible. For example, the newly launched Workforce Intelligence Hub can detect overtime trends, correlate them with customer satisfaction data and shift coverage patterns, then automatically trigger rebalancing recommendations or even initiate hiring workflows through Rapid Hire. This level of orchestration transforms how organizations operate complex frontline workforces.
The hub serves as an operational command center, giving executives and managers unprecedented access to workforce insights. Built on the world’s largest collection of workforce data, it delivers critical benchmarks to understand organizational performance, 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.
The hub will be available in multiple editions to meet different customer needs:
- The Benchmark Edition provides comparative analytics and industry insights.
- The Insights Edition adds deeper workforce intelligence and predictions.
- The Access and Action Edition enables automation and integration with external systems.
This tiered approach will allow customers to adopt intelligence capabilities at their own pace while creating clear upgrade paths.
People-First AI: Building Trust Through Transparency and Value
UKG’s approach to artificial intelligence, Bryte AI, stands out for its emphasis on earning customer trust and delivering tangible business value. In an environment where many organizations struggle with AI adoption, UKG’s methodical, people-first approach aligns with what Brandon Hall Group™ research consistently shows: Almost half of organizations remain in the early stages of AI evolution and face significant barriers to adoption.
According to Brandon Hall Group’s AI Progression Model, organizations move through five stages of AI maturity: Awareness, Experimentation, Integration, Optimization, and Transformation. Many organizations get stuck between Awareness and Experimentation, uncertain about how to move forward safely and effectively. UKG’s approach addresses these concerns head-on by focusing on explainability, governance, and measurable outcomes.
The company has developed an advanced AI ecosystem with a sophisticated architecture including intent classification, specialized and foundational models, agentic frameworks, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) eventing, all designed to deliver people-first AI experiences.
UKG distinguishes between three types of AI capabilities, and this clarity helps customers understand what they’re adopting and why:
- Actions are AI-powered features embedded in applications that all customers can access, like AI-powered search.
- Assistants are AI capabilities that help users complete single, well-defined tasks such as answering questions, drafting content, or retrieving information. Examples include conversational reporting, frontline insights, and goal-writing assistance.
- Agents represent the highest-value tier: AI that works as a delegate, autonomously executing multi-step processes, coordinating across systems, and delivering recommendations. UKG is building high-value agentic offerings like Dynamic Labor Management, Autonomous Pay, HRSD (Human Resources Service Delivery), and Time Compliance agents that fundamentally transform how work gets done.
This distinction matters because it sets appropriate expectations. Organizations can adopt Assistants to help frontline employees and managers work more efficiently without worrying about AI making autonomous decisions. When they’re ready, they can move to Agents that take action independently while maintaining appropriate human oversight and approval workflows.
The company is advancing an agentic AI strategy through Bryte, which operates as a high-value capability that autonomously executes multi-step processes across systems. Key agentic offerings span the platform, including Dynamic Labor Management for optimizing staffing, People Assist for automating HR tasks, and Pay Processing for autonomous payroll operations.
The company is also modernizing user experiences with voice-first, multimodal interfaces accessible across all roles (Early Adopters start early 2026), while the UKG Frontline Workforce Network provides frontline workers with integrated financial health services through partnerships with providers like Payactiv, Chime, and PayPal, with plans to expand into wellness and lifestyle offerings.
Barger’s Go-to-Market Strategy: Customer-Centric AI Adoption
President of GTM Rachel Barger presented UKG’s go-to-market strategy, which centers on their Workforce Operating Platform integrating HR, workforce management (WFM), and pay capabilities. The platform is built around “People-First AI” that spans from AI assistants to intelligent agents, all underpinned by their People Fabric and Workforce Intelligence layers. UKG is focused on augmenting and improving the frontline employee experience through AI-powered tools and features.
A key component of Barger’s market approach is driving AI adoption through digital prompts delivered by their Customer Success Team. The company emphasizes delivering the right resource at the right time through the right channel, using telemetry and data-driven insights to enable proactive customer engagement.
For example, when telemetry detects that a customer misses their first payroll run, the system automatically triggers a call to action, prompting the Customer Success Manager to reach out and offer support before the situation escalates. Similarly, UKG uses digital motions to surface relevant functionality to customers, such as suggesting the Absence module to customers with high Timekeeping usage, thereby creating value-add opportunities at ideal moments.
UKG’s customer success model is deliberately customer-centric, featuring multiple touchpoints including Account Management Teams, Customer Success Managers, Global Support, the UKG Community, Product Teams, and Services Teams. This comprehensive support structure aims to help customers realize continuous value from their investment and achieve their business outcomes.
Customer Experience: From Conformity to Co-Creation
UKG’s transformation of customer experience represents a shift from standardized service delivery to personalized, AI-powered engagement across the entire customer lifecycle. Chief Customer Experience Officer Bob DelPonte outlined how AI is reshaping every touchpoint from implementation through ongoing support.
UKG is undertaking a significant transformation in its customer experience strategy, moving away from standardized approaches toward highly personalized, AI-driven engagement models. The company’s evolution framework outlines a progression from a foundational era in 2020 through current capabilities toward a future where customer experience becomes the primary brand differentiator. This trajectory spans five strategic dimensions: experience as a competitive advantage, AI and automation capabilities, personalization approaches, proactivity and predictiveness, and omnichannel evolution.
The transformation is most visible in UKG’s reimagining of key customer touchpoints. Year-end processing, traditionally delivered through generic email campaigns and standardized checklists, has evolved into personalized plans that analyze each customer’s unique profile and proactively deliver customized resources.
Similarly, new administrator training has shifted from one-size-fits-all learning paths to adaptive plans where customers receive suggested courses, instant registration capabilities, and automated reminders tailored to their specific context and role. These changes reflect UKG’s broader evolution from reactive support models toward what the company describes as predictive, personalized, and proactive customer experiences.
The company is also piloting innovative service delivery approaches. In one payroll implementation example, AI analysis of legacy customer data reduced configuration preparation time from the typical four to six weeks to just 12 hours, enabling the team to complete solution overview and payroll parallel testing in a two-day onsite visit.
For enterprise customers, UKG has introduced the Emerald Experience, a premium offering featuring dedicated Experience Managers, a Command Center providing overnight monitoring, Priority Care for frictionless case handling, a Points Portfolio offering flexible currency for adoption and innovation initiatives, and exclusive influence opportunities.
The results speak for themselves. UKG has achieved a 92% Support OSAT (Overall Satisfaction) score, with response times reduced by 55% in just six months. More than 75% of customers surveyed are willing to serve as references, indicating deep satisfaction with their UKG experience.
UKG Community has evolved into more than a support portal; it’s become a platform for peer learning, advocacy, and shared success. The community provides always-on access to content, how-to articles, training discussions, and connections to other UKG customers. This community connector role recognizes that customers often learn best from each other.
UKG is moving toward a future where the platform anticipates customer needs and delivers prescriptive guidance before issues arise. This shift from “fix it when it breaks” to “prevent it from breaking” fundamentally changes the customer relationship. The overarching philosophy positions UKG and its customers as “One Team” working together to create intelligent, human, and transformative experiences.
The Partnership Imperative: A Growth Multiplier
UKG’s path to doubling revenue from $5 billion to $10 billion runs directly through its partner ecosystem. Chief Partner Officer Jay Dettling presented compelling evidence that partnerships aren’t just a go-to-market strategy; they’re a growth multiplier that improves nearly every business metric.
UKG’s Global Partners and Ecosystems organization operates under a clear mission to grow the business by influencing sales and customer success through value-added partnerships. The organization manages an extensive ecosystem designed to implement, innovate, and reach new customers across three primary partner categories: Technology Partners, Services Partners, and Influence Partners.
This is not about offloading work to partners. Partners multiply UKG’s reach, accelerate opportunities and fuel innovation, according to data shared during the event.
The partner ecosystem encompasses over 370 technology and services partners featured in the UKG Marketplace, which attracts approximately 15,000 monthly users. Technology Partners, including major players like Oracle NetSuite, Google Cloud, and Equifax, build integrations to extend UKG solution capabilities.
Services Partners such as Accenture, KPMG and Infosys provide implementation and business transformation expertise. Influence Partners, including advisory firms, benefit brokers, private equity firms, and group purchasing organizations, help broaden UKG’s market reach and influence purchasing decisions.
UKG has set ambitious growth targets for partner engagement. The company aims to increase partner influence while growing partner direct revenue and partner direct delivery. The strategic focus includes expanding partner-created leads and partner direct delivery capabilities significantly.
The FY26 strategy centers on three key pillars: growing the UKG pipeline with partner-created leads to generate warm introductions and shorter sales cycles, co-selling successfully with partners who extend reach and validate solutions, and leveraging new circles of influence to connect with decision-makers that UKG might not reach independently. Data demonstrates the value of this approach, with partners improving win rates by 30% and integrations with technology partners driving 30% higher renewal rates.
The Technology Partner program achieved notable FY25 milestones, including securing 6,000+ leads for partners and adding 50+ new partner integrations to the marketplace. The program currently features 270+ technology partners, with >50% of UKG customers using at least one partner integration and approximately 50 new partners onboarded annually. FY26 initiatives focus on Premier Partners, OEM expansion, and the Frontline Worker Network, an example of which provides AI-powered financial coaching through a partnership with Finley.
UKG’s Services Partner program made significant strides in FY25 by modernizing training with 20+ new certification paths and achieving 92% customer satisfaction, with clients likely to rehire their consulting and implementation partner. The program now includes 85+ service partners in the marketplace who collectively employ several thousand trained UKG consultants. Services partners provide crucial support for accelerating go-live timelines and driving customer outcomes. Leadership was strengthened with the addition of Savas Gunduz, UKG VP Strategic Alliances, to lead Services Partner teams.
The Influence Partner program expanded significantly with new team members added to bolster PE, GPO, and broker partner programs. UKG launched its first GPO partnership with CoreTrust, with three more partnerships in development.
Barger emphasized how the company is scaling its reach and impact through a global partner ecosystem, which includes new channels to market such as GPO partnerships, broker and private equity acceleration, and activation of the Google Cloud Marketplace. UKG is shifting toward partner-sourced leads and co-selling, noting that win rates are higher when partners are involved, while also building a Frontline Worker Network that creates value for customers and generates additional revenue for UKG.
Strategic alliances with Google Cloud, KPMG, and Accenture strengthen UKG’s global credibility and delivery capacity. The Google Cloud partnership goes beyond technology to include co-innovation on AI capabilities and joint go-to-market initiatives. The Google Cloud Marketplace activation creates new sales channels, while the technical collaboration on Bryte AI and the Workforce Intelligence Hub demonstrates deep product integration. The presentation concluded with a conversation between Jay Dettling and Jim Fairweather, Head of AI GTM at Google Cloud, focusing on building the next generation of workforce intelligence with agentic AI.
Enterprise Power for the SMB Market: UKG Ready
Another differentiator is UKG Ready, which is the company’s growth engine for small and midsize businesses with 75 to 1,500 employees, according to Chris Kiklas, GVP General Manager of UKG Ready. Ready operates at a significant scale, according to confidential data shared during the event, while maintaining the simplicity that SMBs demand.
UKG Ready differentiates through five key attributes:
- It delivers the power and depth of enterprise HCM platforms in a solution-sized and priced for smaller teams.
- The platform functions as a true Workforce Operating Platform for its target audience with deep domain expertise in scheduling, fatigue management, and labor cost control.
- Trust through compliance and accuracy builds organizational confidence and drives retention.
- Support scales through agentic AI-driven troubleshooting and self-service.
- Finally, an expanding Solutions Exchange creates an “App Store for HCM” with 370+ partners offering integrated services.
The platform’s evolution mirrors UKG’s broader strategy: bring enterprise capabilities to all market segments while recognizing that SMBs need solutions that work immediately without extensive customization or dedicated IT resources. For the SMB segment, UKG Ready serves as the growth engine, with initiatives including Project Lighthouse aimed at using AI to accelerate product implementations and reduce friction.
Global Payroll Evolution: One View’s Touchless Vision
Richard Limpkin, GVP and General Manager of UKG One View Global Pay, outlined a vision that transforms payroll from a transactional necessity into a strategic advantage powered by AI and deep integration with the broader Workforce Operating Platform.
One View achieved 57% year-over-year customer growth in 2025, now managing over $14.6 billion in payroll across more than 150 countries. With greater than 99% accuracy and a 91% customer satisfaction score, the platform has moved well beyond proving its core capabilities. Now, UKG is focused on the next evolution: an autonomous, touchless global payroll that requires minimal human intervention while maintaining the trust and accuracy that payroll demands.
UKG’s vision for One View centers on creating a true multi-country solution that does not require human intervention in the flow of data or orchestration. This represents a significant departure from how most global payroll platforms operate today. Traditional approaches rely heavily on manual data transfers, human validation at multiple checkpoints, and significant effort to reconcile information across systems and countries.
The concept of “touchless payroll” captures UKG’s ambition. In 2025, One View achieved 84% of pay groups processed touchless, reducing manual effort and time spent on routine payroll tasks. This frees payroll professionals to focus on strategic activities like workforce planning, compensation strategy and employee experience.
The evolution of One View represents UKG’s broader vision for transforming HCM from a “system of record” to a “system of intelligence.” Payroll has traditionally been viewed as a necessary but purely transactional function — pay people accurately, on time, and in compliance with regulations. One View maintains these fundamentals while adding strategic capabilities that change the role of payroll in the organization.
The Bottom Line: A Platform Built for This Moment
After two days of intensive briefings, one conclusion emerges with crystal clarity: UKG has built a workforce management platform precisely calibrated for this emerging era. The convergence of AI maturity, platform economics, and the urgent need to better support frontline workers and smaller businesses creates a unique window of opportunity that UKG is positioned to capture.
The company’s strategic clarity stands out. UKG knows who they serve (the 80% of workers on the frontline), what they’re building (a Workforce Operating Platform powered by unified data and AI), and how they’ll scale (through partnerships, vertical specialization, and ecosystem expansion). This clarity enables the kind of focused execution that compounds over time.
The AI approach balances ambition with pragmatism. UKG isn’t trying to boil the ocean. They’re building assistants that help users complete tasks more efficiently, then layering on agents that autonomously execute workflows where it makes sense. They’re earning trust through transparency, governance and measurable outcomes rather than pursuing AI for its own sake.
The focus on customer co-innovation ensures that product development stays grounded in real needs rather than chasing theoretical possibilities. With more than 2,300 go-lives in FY25 and customer satisfaction at record highs, UKG is delivering value while innovating at scale.
Perhaps most importantly, UKG’s emphasis on frontline workers addresses a massive market need that many competitors overlook. UKG has built deep expertise in the industries where frontline workers drive operations: healthcare, retail, manufacturing, hospitality, and the public sector. This specialization, cultivated over several decades, creates defensible competitive advantages that compound over time.
With the foundation firmly in place — from People Fabric to People-First AI, from vertical specialization to global partnerships — UKG is executing a strategy designed to fundamentally transform how organizations operate in the era of intelligent workforce management. The company has the strategy, architecture and execution capability to achieve its ambitious vision of doubling revenue while defining the future of work for the global workforce.
