UKG and Google have taken the first steps to bring the power of practical and purposeful generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to the HCM landscape to help businesses embrace the future of AI.
While consumer applications like Bard have become some of the best adopted products in history, leaders and practitioners are exploring how GenAI can address organizational challenges at scale to create value for their customers and employees.
Embracing this opportunity, UKG and Google joined forces to create GenAI solutions for workforces that are practical, powerful, and purposeful: The solutions are designed to enhance people’s lives and create remarkable experiences that foster autonomy, meaning, and purpose in the workplace.
In this blog post, we’ll share UKG and Google’s rich history of innovation, how we partnered during our quarterly hackathon, our joint commitment to the responsible use of artificial intelligence, and the exciting future for using GenAI to create more powerful business insights that transform decision making and help leaders more effectively manage teams.
A rich history of innovation
Innovating with artificial intelligence and machine learning isn’t new to Google or UKG—the two companies have collaborated since 2016 to enable better employee experiences.
Google, an AI-first company, incorporated machine learning into its solutions beginning in 2015, and invented the Transformer in 2017, leading the large language model (LLM) revolution we’re living today.
At UKG, a leader in human capital management, we’ve infused AI into our suites with schedule optimization, statistical-based forecasting, and retention prediction, as well as natural language processing and sentiment analysis.
Boosting the partnership: Google joins UKG’s quarterly hackathon
To accelerate the innovation already in motion, Google joined UKG at “48 Hours,” our two-day, quarterly hackathon, as our first innovation partner.
Our mission was to prototype how UKG could bring GenAI into our products to deliver more value to customers and serve all people—to create more experiences that bring bold, creative, and ethical GenAI solutions to organizations to make people feel connected, cared for, and inspired.
The collaborative experience brought more than 1,100 U Krewers (our nickname for UKG employees) from around the globe—Florida, Massachusetts, India, Canada, France, and more—to develop novel, impactful, and feasible solutions that leverage GenAI.
The aim is to create more experiences that bring bold, creative, and ethical GenAI solutions to organizations to make people feel connected, cared for, and inspired.
With the help of our Google colleagues, including Trupti Patel, Purvi Trivedi, U Krewers like Toby Brooks, and many others, Google Cloud supplied powerful enterprise tooling during the hackathon. This allowed for open-innovation access to Google’s enterprise-grade GenAI LLMs and AI toolkit through Vertex AI.
Google experts also led pre-hack learning sessions, offering insight into enterprise and consumer GenAI tools. The hackathon included creative non-developer challenge sessions, such as generating a mystery-themed short story using Bard, generating a logo that captured the spirit of our partnership with Google, and playing prompt engineer to identify AI-generated images to extend the learning beyond coding prototypes.
More than 40% of hackathon participants came from departments outside of engineering, such as IT, cloud, product, marketing, finance, legal, UX, support, and services. After the experience, 91% of U Krewers who participated felt more comfortable working with AI and LLMs, and 92% learned something about AI that will help them in their current roles.
Google Cloud helped UKG accomplish the seemingly impossible challenge of enabling a record number of technologists to explore the power of GenAI. The experience concluded with a live-streamed awards ceremony, hosted on the Google Cambridge campus, to celebrate innovators at UKG.
Google Cloud helped UKG accomplish the seemingly impossible challenge of enabling a record number of technologists to explore the power of GenAI.
Responsible use of AI
Both organizations prioritize ethical innovation as a cornerstone of their GenAI strategies and pledged a joint commitment to use AI in a responsible and ethical manner throughout all innovation cycles.
For example, during the pre-hackathon ideation and orientation sessions, participants listened to dialogue between UKG executives, researchers, practitioners, IT professionals, legal professionals, security architects, and Google partners. This half-day event educated U Krewers around the risks, drew a hard line to protect company and customer data, and redirected energy and excitement into the Google-Cloud-secured guard-railed outlet for the exploration of GenAI. Participants were also encouraged to consider simpler GenAI use cases or those powered without sensitive data sets.
We also crafted a participation agreement to anchor all hackathon innovation around our commitment to responsible and ethical use of AI. As a result, teams submitted dozens of ideas and working prototypes that use generative AI to make the workplace kinder, more collaborative, and a great place to work—all with a people-centric approach.
Using AI to create great workplaces
By combining the strengths of UKG’s people-centric AI capabilities and Google’s cloud offerings, UKG and Google have taken the first steps to bring practical and purposeful generative artificial intelligence to the HCM landscape to transform how organizations empower their people and run their businesses.
Our efforts continue to accelerate, and we’re making even bigger leaps that will help businesses responsibly leverage and apply our capabilities to their people strategies. For example, GenAI will allow UKG to create more conversational interactions with its HCM solutions, augment employee requests with more relevant business insights, and support people managers with a deeper understanding of how business decisions can impact employee engagement.
As organizations consider how to deploy GenAI in ways that improve the lives of their people, UKG is committed to exploring how all emerging technologies like GenAI can enhance the workplace experience for everyone, including our U Krewers.
UKG is committed to exploring how all emerging technologies like GenAI can enhance the workplace experience for everyone, including our U Krewers.
While the hackathon generated several fresh GenAI use cases in HCM that our product teams are evaluating with customers (including two potentially patentable ideas), it fueled the organization to explore new ways to enhance the employee experience for our own people.
By creating an environment of open exploration while leveraging Google Cloud’s cutting-edge tools, UKG is bringing the entire organization into the innovation cycles. With its powerful cloud tools that make AI innovation not only easier to create but easier to adopt, Google Cloud democratizes AI in practice and allows us at UKG to deliver on our mission: Our purpose is people.
For real examples of how UKG is using GenAI to address unbiased talent sourcing, build diverse workforces, and support hiring, check out Google’s video.
