This GCC is reshaping HR globally with agentic AI - The Times of India

UKG is hardly a household name outside the world of HR technology, yet the Massachusetts-headquartered firm has quietly grown into one of the world’s largest privately held software companies, valued at $30 billion. Its cloud platforms handle everything from time-keeping and shift scheduling to payroll, talent management and employee sentiment analysis for more than 80,000 organisations – a customer list that stretches from corner shops to the biggest global conglomerates.In effect, UKG sits in the plumbing of global employment, processing what chief product officer Suresh Vittal calls “the economic engine of work”: last year alone its systems logged 12 billion clock-ins, shepherded 117 million job applications, and helped companies hire three million people.Much of that machinery is being built – and increasingly conceived – in India. The company’s global capability centre (GCC) began in Noida in 2007 with a brief to extend its workforce-management tools. Eighteen years on, it employs more than 3,000 people across Noida, Bengaluru, Mumbai, and a brand-new hub in Pune. “India is effectively a mini UKG,” says Vittal. “We cannot replicate the innovation advantage we get here anywhere else.”That advantage is growing as UKG pushes deeper into agentic AI – software agents that can reason over vast specialist datasets and act autonomously while keeping a human in the loop. Payroll, one of the most labyrinthine back-office chores, is a case in point. “You have to juggle local tax codes, compliance updates, garnishments, benefits and company policies for every employee before a pay-cheque can be issued,” Vittal explains. UKG’s India teams have written a flock of agents – continuous-compliance, tax-filing and scheduling among them – that scan new regulations, generate individualised pay estimates and surface discrepancies for an administrator’s review. Tasks that once swallowed teams of people armed with spreadsheets are now pushed through in minutes.

The agents come with a `confidence score’ so managers can see precisely how sure the model is and inspect the rationale in plain English before acting on it. “Responsible AI is non-negotiable,” says group vice-president and India country manager Nitin Chandel. “We’re making frontline workers more effective, not redundant – freeing them from repetitive low-value chores so they can focus on higher-order work.”UKG’s data advantage is formidable. Its Great Place to Work surveys capture the mood of 20 million employees globally each year. That depth lets engineers in India train narrowly tailored language and decision models rather than rely on generic public ones. At the heart of the stack sits People Fabric, a harmonised schema that pulls payroll, attendance, benefits, and expense data from the disparate ledgers of any enterprise into a single source of truth. Data pipelines feed this information to AI models, and a technique called retrieval-augmented generation tops up the models with the latest relevant facts just before they respond.UKG runs regular ₹agent-thons’ open to all engineers; the most recent attracted the largest cohort from India, producing prototypes that are already finding their way into product roadmaps. Chandel himself leads global human capital management (HCM) engineering from Noida, one of several India-based executives who own worldwide charters. “India is not following; it is leading,” he says.The expansion into Pune underlines that ambition. Opened last month, the facility will specialise in AI and big-data work and is expected to absorb a large share of the new hires UKG plans to make in India. Early-career recruitment is a priority: this year the firm has taken on 400 graduates from the IITs, NITs and top business schools, pairing them with seasoned mentors to accelerate what Vittal calls “the innovation curve”.The move also positions UKG for the next frontier: letting its agents negotiate with those of other enterprise platforms.