The Signal Insight
Jennifer Morgan, who became the first female leader of a DAX-listed company when Germany’s SAP named her co-CEO in 2019, now leads a US business processing $1 trillion of payroll data each year. UKG, formed in 2020 from the merger of Ultimate Software and Kronos, provides HR services and workforce management technology to organizations employing 65 million hourly and frontline workers in industries including retail, healthcare, and manufacturing.
Since arriving in 2024 from Blackstone, one of UKG’s private equity owners, Morgan says she has not seen those jobs become much more vulnerable to AI disruption. But she has struck partnerships with the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI, seeing opportunities to “give the worker agency” with AI-powered tools that let them plan schedules around their childcare, or volunteer for overtime when they need to earn extra money.
Morgan’s pitch to employers is that pairing these tools with data-driven insights into wages, absenteeism, and inefficiencies in schedules can cut billions of dollars from corporate America’s $1 trillion-a-year attrition bill. Replacing just one hourly worker costs the average employer about $5,000, she notes.
Morgan’s strategy is to reposition UKG from a provider of administrative support tools to a “workforce intelligence hub” that uses shift data to inform operational decisions in real time.
