Event Recap: ADP Innovation Day 2025

ADP wrapped up another Innovation Day hosted in the Big Apple.  This year, the event was a bit larger as ADP brought together industry analysts and select partners for an update on the business, its latest innovation, and its GTM for its suite of HR solutions.

I was privileged to spend some time talking with President and CEO Maria Black, who has led the company since taking the reins of the HR technology and services stalwart from Carlos Rodriguez in 2023.  We had a nice talk – pondered the future of work, opining on what it might look like and hypothesizing on a few trends and potential outcomes we think we could see.

I say this more often than I can count, but I wish we could have recorded it. Maybe I’ll convince Maria to join Julie and me to ‘geek out’ on the future of work and HR on a future episode of the HR & Payroll 2.0 podcast.

What stands out when talking with Maria is her obsession and passion for getting the future of work right – if not defining it.  In ADP value prop terms, that means making it “easy, smart, and human”.  This obsession feels like a cultural norm that continues when you listen to her executive leadership team and when you speak with ADP customers who tell their “why ADP” story and why they are infusing “more ADP” into their HR strategies.

I believe ADP has a mammoth, if not unprecedented, responsibility to define and lead the market toward the future of HR and work, unlike any provider in the marketplace.  In the same way we look to Apple or Google to define the tech we didn’t know we needed in our lives; ADP has earned a similar expectation in an industry it created more than 75 years ago.

Through the decades, ADP has innovated, led, and become trusted by more than 1.1M companies in over 140 countries globally, including more than 80% of the Fortune 500.  ADP now pays over 42M workers globally - 1 in 5 Americans receive an ADP pay slip, and the myADP app has been downloaded by millions with nearly 4M reviews alone (not to mention a 4.7 rating on the Apple App store). 

The saying in the market goes “you don’t get fired for hiring ADP” – just like “you don’t get fired for hiring IBM.” Both firms offer masterclasses in how to build a brand through consistency, reliability, decades of expertise, and trust. Heavy on the trust. 

Listen to ADP clients for their “why ADP”, and you will hear common themes. They know and trust ADP with their workforces, leveraging its innovation to solve real problems and de-risk their organizations. More importantly, they convey confidence that ADP is invested in their success through innovation, flexibility, and customer experience.

As I’ve pointed out in years past, this isn’t your parents’ ADP anymore. It is a much more flexible, agile, technology-enabled, and data-driven provider than at any point in its long history.

I’ll paraphrase a lengthy comment during the customer panel that stood out on the value of their “partnership” with ADP and the differentiation in its decades of learning and experience.

As a sizable, global enterprise organization in hypergrowth mode through continuous M&A the customer pointed to the “…army of resources” that comes with partnering with ADP (she emphasized partnering consistently). She went on to explain, “…I thought I was hiring a payroll provider, but I didn't realize I was gaining a business advisor, a project manager, and a change consultant with a community to learn from and network with.”

This isn’t unique to customers, the ADP ecosystem is creating win-win-win outcomes for ADP, its customers and partners alike.

I happened to have spoken to a very successful and unique benefits broker a few weeks prior to ADP Innovation Day, where I asked which HCM tech provider they prefer to work with and why.  “No preference – we do what is best for our clients. But if it were our decision, we would choose ADP.” 

Of course, I asked why ADP? 

The answer: “trust”.  

Trust that the customer will be in good hands (referring to the tech, the service, data security, innovation, integrations, and more).

More importantly, “ADP trusts us”. 

I pushed on this further, and the answer was rooted in how ADP provides them and the broader partner community the resources, tools, and autonomy to activate its solutions for clients of all sizes.  The keyword here is autonomy, making it easy for partners to win with their joint customers.  In this case, the broker-partner sees a common lag time among ADP competitors, where tech deployments are often delayed until provider resources become available to support the process alongside the partner.  

Although anecdotal, it speaks to ADP’s ability to continue scaling beyond its unmatched milestone of 1M customers by removing friction for partners and customers. It also speaks to the flexibility and agility of activating its solutions, enabling customers to go live faster and realize ROI sooner, a key focus area it’s doubling down on as a strategic AI investment across its platforms and solutions.  

Innovation with intention.

ADP always brings some new products to show at ADP Innovation Days, and this year was no different; it's one analyst event where there literally is an update for everyone, regardless of where your lens is focused.

Let’s start with AI, where ADP made a single yet notable announcement of the latest round of expanded use cases for ADP Assist, its generative AI solution. ADP Assist is integrated into Workforce Now and Lyric HCM and supports use cases across payroll, time, talent, benefits, recruitment, analytics, reporting, and compliance functions, and offers a unified AI experience that learns from user interactions and prompts and improves over time. Each use case is purpose-oriented around challenges HR and payroll teams commonly face in supporting their businesses.

Expanded ADP Assist use cases include:

• Advanced payroll anomaly detection for proactive error identification, resolution, and suggested corrective actions.

• Deeper conversational HR experience with contextual understanding of intent for obtaining answers, insights, and visual charts and presentation-ready reports.

• Real-time Workforce Trends leveraging ADP’s deep data set anonymized from its 1.1M customers in 140 countries, to surface workforce trends, guidance, and recommended actions to support leaders with improved decision making.

• Global compliance monitoring of changing legislation globally, surfacing guidance and recommendations to practitioners for implementation.

• AI-driven personal development planning for ADP Learning, which analyzes employee roles, skills, and goals for tailored learning plans and recommendations to support career development.

Continuing, on the HCM tech side; ADP has sharpened its GTM and doubled down on its HCM platforms with key updates on Workforce Now and Lyric HCM - ADP’s flagship HCM solutions targeted to middle market and global enterprise organizations, respectively.

Workforce Now: getting smarter, and more talent focused.

A look at the ADP Workforce Now roadmap of now, near, and next innovation paints a clearer picture of where ADP is heading with its AI vision and strategy and where ADP Assist is playing a growing role in its technology and services.  Use cases are expanding across the platform to remove friction from the user experience and address nagging, time-consuming, but critical tasks across the HR spectrum.

A closer look shows an emphasis on talent acquisition and the candidate experience. ADP is taking a huge step forward with helping its customers access skills and talent with the launch of ADP Talent Pool.  The AI-enabled talent marketplace offers customers access to ADP’s massive ecosystem of talent and jobs (candidates opt in). 

For the candidate, AI tools will support proactive nudges, best-fit role matching, and tools to support personalized job searches like custom resumes and other resources. For the employer, they gain access to over 1M candidates, skill needs candidate matching, enable modern, intelligent candidate experiences, and workforce agility in being able to find the right skills, at the right time with confidence.

Lyric HCM: maturing alongside the emerging enterprise buyer.

ADP Lyric HCM, its flagship HCM solution for complex, global enterprise organizations, continues to see gradual adoption.  Now supporting employees in 38 countries, with its largest customer having over 55k employees.

A notable storyline that gets overlooked with Lyric is its unified and highly localized capabilities, which bring together HR, payroll, workforce management, and talent for global organizations – an essential foundation for scale and agility as more employers find their footprints creeping into new locations.

A quick look at the Lyric HCM roadmap points to the practitioner and employee experiences, where ADP continues to double down and ADP Assist is playing a greater role in enabling personalization, insights, and outcomes. More localizations and globally oriented solutions are also accelerated in Lyric, where payroll, leaves, and talent are all advancing with the roadmap.

Notably, you can also see Lyric HCM maturing into some ERP-esque areas, with a new AI-enabled position planning and budgeting capability, as well as organizational modeling and integrated GL preview capabilities on the way – all of which tie perfectly into its plans for its workforce management strategy and differentiate Lyric HCM amongst complex enterprise buyers.

The Workforce Management GTM becomes clearer.

Arguably, the most anticipated segment of ADP Innovation Day 2025 included an update on ADP’s strategic acquisition (Oct 2024) of WorkForce Software, filling a much-needed gap in the product offering and GTM.

The addition of WorkForce Software to the ADP suite of solutions has multiple notable impacts to ADP, its customers, partners and the broader marketplace. Hear mine and Julie Fernandez’ thoughts on the acquisition news when

announced in October 2024, on The HR & Payroll 2.0 podcast.

ADP gained a powerful, modern, and globally capable WFM platform that will ultimately replace an aging and maintenance-heavy suite of legacy time and attendance options. Further, ADP plugs an advanced time and attendance capability gap that was leaking WFM revenue potential to UKG, one of ADP’s biggest partners that was increasingly becoming a bigger competitor. 

Most valuable is that ADP’s GTM can now support multinational clients with a full suite of advanced workforce solutions globally.  Global time + global payroll + global HR, underpinned by a local and global managed services capability for payroll, compliance, and more. It opens the door for and powers a competitive value prop that lends itself to customers adopting more ADP to power their HR stack, particularly as they scale.

For most organizations, their payroll complexity is largely derived from the build-to-gross/source-to-gross activities.  Much of the heavy front-line worker sector and union complexities are rooted in time, scheduling, and the sourcing of data inputs for payroll to conduct the gross-to-net process.  The addition of WorkForce Software provides a path to transforming WFM alongside payroll through a unified, integrated, familiar, and globally capable partner - at a time when the appetite and need for strategic workforce management, workforce alignment, and WFM Centers of Excellence are rising.

ADP provided clarity on the plans for WorkForce Software.  ADP (thankfully) will keep the WFM addition available as a standalone offering, allowing adoption absent other products.  ADP intends to provide every customer with the support and options to fit their unique needs in advancing their WFM maturity with ADP systems. Of course, ADP is underway with fully integrating WorkForce Software with its HCM solutions, where the advanced time and attendance platform is an option for Workforce Now and Lyric HCM customers alongside native time capabilities being developed in each HCM solution (e.g., Next Gen Time for Lyric HCM).

WFM GTM clarity with options.

A much-anticipated update from ADP was on the WFM front, where they clarified the pathways to WorkForceSoftware for customers of ADP time solutions seeking to upgrade their legacy ADP platforms.

For customers of ADP Workforce Manager (based on UKG Pro WFM):

• ADP will discontinue sales of ADP Workforce Manager on September 30, 2026

• ADP has signed a 10-year agreement with UKG to continue support for adopters.

• Customers can continue to add new users, or modules (sold by ADP) at any time until the deal expires in 2035.

• Existing features and functionality remain available, and customers will receive enhancements as/when provided by UKG.

• While ADP Workforce Manager clients will continue to have access to the latest version of ADP Workforce Manager, new products or specific modules developed and sold by UKG in the future may not be available to ADP Workforce Manager customers.

For customers of Enterprise eTime, Vantage Time, and Enhanced Time (based on UKG Pro WFM):

• ADP has discontinued selling Enterprise eTime, Vantage Time, and Enhanced Time solutions.

• ADP clients using any of the above solutions who desire to purchase ADP Workforce Manager from ADP have until December 31, 2026, to enter into an agreement to migrate to ADP Workforce Manager. The customer may also purchase UKG Pro directly from UKG.

• Customers using any of the ADP time solutions listed above will continue to receive the same feature functionality, support, and updates through September 2030.

• Customers can continue to use the solutions and add new users, through September 2030.

• ADP will work with customers in advance of September 2030, to determine the best fit path of choice and transition plans for their workforce management transition.

From a WFM roadmap perspective, aside from integrating WorkForce Software with its various platforms and normalizing the UX across solutions (likely to take 12-18 months), ADP is also partnering with Visier for embedded workforce analytics and integrating Microsoft Co-Pilot. Generative AI is also in play for data migration, configuration, and deployment, to assist clients in going live and realizing ROI faster with less friction and manual effort.  A key theme across all of ADP’s suite of platforms and solutions.

Winning with AI through trust.

More than a million organizations have trusted ADP for their workforce needs over the years.  The reality is that most of these organizations are unlikely to prioritize investing in AI specifically for HR; instead, they will more likely engage and access AI through commercially available HR solutions.  Given ADP’s reach, it is very likely that many American workers will engage AI in HR or payroll by way of an ADP product. 

This is where I believe ADP has a unique responsibility to lead as it has so many times in its history and build on the foundation of trust it has earned with its customers.

The adoption of AI in HR will depend on the level of trust practitioners and leaders have with and for AI.  Trust that the technology can perform exactly as expected and reliably support their workforces and use cases consistently and accurately providing the insights and automation to create more value for their businesses and their careers.  

I appreciate the cautious approach ADP has taken to its AI development, and the use cases it has chosen to address are showing real impact for users.  However, I would love to see more agentic AI coming from ADP, particularly as its big tech HCM competition is pushing the pace with agentic worker sets and solutions.  Agentic AI is already present in a light capacity across the Workforce Now and Lyric HCM roadmaps, with more developments on the horizon.

By pairing its massive data set with expertise from over 70 years of supporting workforces in over 140 countries with a full spectrum of HR services and solutions, accelerated by the well-timed (summer 2023) acquisition of Sora and its orchestration capabilities, and ADP Assist bringing it all together. ADP can activate a world of differentiated agentic capabilities that will likely be the future of ADP, its technology, and its services. This is an area where ADP will drive more value for customers, further establish its deep trust and credibility, and gain market share. 

As an example, consider the emergence of ‘Services as a Software’ (credit HFS Research), where autonomous agents conduct work, handle tasks, make decisions, and produce results without human input (with human oversight, of course).  Whereby the value and ROI are less about the actual software and more about the outcomes it produces.  An ideal machine-enabled, human-led future for complex processes like payroll or benefits, and don’t forget the full spectrum of HR services and solutions ADP can and does offer well beyond payroll, which it could re-imagine.  

With over 1M organizations looking to ADP to innovate and lead them into the future, ADP’s responsibility and opportunity are massive and will be won or lost on the ability to maintain what it’s spent decades earning.