2x faster CPU performance, enabling real-time workforce intelligence
80,000+ organizations transforming work with agentic AI
30% increase in Git contributions with AI-first coding
24/7 agentic self-service for tens of millions of employees
AI agents for complex data analysis, compliance, payroll, and more
With Google Cloud, UKG is delivering a governed, agentic system of action, providing real-time intelligence to tens of millions of frontline workers.
With Google Cloud, UKG is delivering a governed, agentic system of action, providing real-time intelligence to tens of millions of frontline workers.
Transforming systems of record
into systems of action
Traditionally, we might have been more of a system of record, but we're really transforming into a system of action. Whether you're a manager managing shifts every day or an employee punching in and out, we want to bring intelligence to those users to help them make decisions really quickly.
Thomas Newton
Head of Cloud and Engineering, UKG
UKG is trusted worldwide to turn workforce insights into action, helping more than 80,000 organizations across 150 countries empower their HR, operations, payroll, and frontline teams to make mission-critical decisions confidently every day. With modern enterprises now shifting toward an agentic future—where AI agents can perceive, reason, and take action on your behalf—the company has started a new journey to ensure its customers can focus on what matters most: their workforce and their business.
“Traditionally, we might have been more of a system of record, but we're really transforming into a system of action,” explains Thomas Newton, UKG’s Head of cloud and engineering. “Whether you're a manager managing shifts every day or an employee punching in and out, we want to bring intelligence to those users to help them make decisions really quickly.”
Classic HR systems have historically operated as passive systems of record. While they excelled at storing and organizing data, they also introduced a significant amount of administrative friction, requiring managers and employees to spend hours digging through menus, dashboards, and records to find the information they need. This manual overhead took a steep toll on productivity, especially for frontline workers who rarely have time to navigate complex interfaces—let alone wait days or even hours for answers.
To continue transforming how work gets done, UKG partnered with Google Cloud to use its full suite of AI technologies to accelerate the adoption and delivery of AI agents across its Workforce Operating Platform, unlocking even deeper workplace understanding for tens of millions of employees.
“When you have these real-time, quick decisions you need to make, that’s a perfect place for AI,” Newton says. “With Google Cloud, UKG has a new way of being a system of action for the frontline.”
Building a Bryter future with Google Cloud AI
With ADK, we’re able to leapfrog our timeline tremendously—four to six weeks producing prototypes and working software. Agent Platform, it’s solving some key problems, from hosting agents to securing them to the governance around them. I can just use those things out-of-the-box and get back to creating value.
Thomas Newton
Head of Cloud and Engineering, UKG
UKG wanted to allow customers to act with greater speed and simplicity with AI, directly in their daily workflows. To realize this vision, UKG created UKG Bryte™ AI—people-first AI that uses Google’s Gemini models to take the complexity out of decision-making and quickly turn insights into action.
“Bryte, that's how customers interact with our systems through AI, and it’s a conversational agent,” Newton says. “I need a quick decision, I need to get access to data that’s not at my fingertips, let the AI do it.”
Instead of losing time searching through data and resources, Gemini’s multimodal and advanced reasoning capabilities allow users to ask questions in natural language to uncover insights and gain immediate clarity. For example, a manager can simply ask about a team’s overtime trends and strategies for reducing burnout risk, and receive a custom analysis with actionable recommendations in seconds.
To further scale these efforts, UKG is using Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and Agent Development Kit (ADK) to build and deploy new Bryte AI agents for everything from complex data analysis to routine HR and admin tasks and self-service assistance.
“With ADK, we’re able to leapfrog our timeline tremendously—four to six weeks producing prototypes and working software,” Newton adds. “Agent Platform, it’s solving some key problems, from hosting agents to securing them to the governance around them. I can just use those things out-of-the-box and get back to creating value.”
To ensure Bryte AI can reliably reason and act across a wide variety of tasks, UKG grounds agents in People Fabric—its data and intelligence platform. Built with Google Cloud’s Agentic Data Cloud, including AlloyDB for PostgreSQL and BigQuery, People Fabric enables real-time access through secure, zero-copy integration, bringing together UKG’s vast operational reality and analytical history, which spans 20 million daily transactions, 730 million scheduled shifts per month, and more than $1 trillion in payroll processed annually.
This unified data foundation allows UKG to provide the deep, trusted business context agents need to drive safe, accurate decisions every time—whether that’s identifying pay discrepancies, adjusting a schedule, or proactively flagging compliance risks.
Making Gemini Enterprise part of the team
We route Claude Code to Agent Platform so that we can get the power of any model we want. We’re creating literally a fleet of agents, enabling and empowering the engineer to go much faster, from requirements validation to shipping code.
Thomas Newton
Head of Cloud and Engineering, UKG
The shift to agentic AI isn’t just transforming how customers work—it’s poised to fundamentally reshape how UKG operates behind the scenes. According to Newton, introducing tools like Agent Platform and ADK ensures engineers can capture productivity gains early, setting them up for success in this next chapter of the AI era.
“We route Claude Code to Agent Platform so that we can get the power of any model we want,” he explains. “We’re creating literally a fleet of agents, enabling and empowering the engineer to go much faster, from requirements validation to shipping code.”
While this AI-first frontier is still unfolding across the broader organization, UKG’s development teams have already seen a significant leap in momentum—achieving a 30% increase in raw code output based on Git contributions alone. In particular, Newton highlights that this new way of working is leveling up the entire team, providing a launchpad for less experienced engineers while enabling senior staff to maximize their expertise and skills.
“We have done a full 180 from, 'Can you please take a look at this' to 'I can't live without it.' Our developers would literally revolt if we took those tools away at this point,” he adds.
This newfound velocity is already paying off, delivering innovations, such as the UKG People Assist™ agent. This HR service desk assistant helps employees resolve HR-related queries independently, offering personalized guidance and information contextualized to their specific role and location. To give customers a simple path to procurement, the UKG People Assist agent marks the first of several planned agents that will launch in both the Gemini Enterprise Agent Gallery and Google Cloud Marketplace.
In addition, UKG will be one of the first organizations to launch Gemini Enterprise internally, empowering its entire global workforce with AI agents embedded directly in the tools they use every day. This rollout will give teams across every department—from sales and software engineering to customer support—instant access to critical information and the ability to build their own custom agents to automate their workflows.
“I believe if you’re going to build things for the customer, learn how to use it for yourself first. So, if you know how agents work in your own workflow, you can apply those learnings and then bring it to the customer,” Newton says.
UKG is a leading global AI platform for HR, pay, and workforce management. Unifying award-winning solutions with the world’s largest collection of workforce data and people-first AI, UKG delivers unrivaled insights into today’s workforce, helping organizations in every industry turn data into decisions that elevate productivity, culture, and the customer experience.
Industry: Information Technology
Location: United States
Products: Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, Gemini Enterprise app, Agentic Data Cloud, BigQuery, AlloyDB
