Event Recap: Dayforce Discover 2025

Dayforce recently held its annual customer conference, Dayforce Discover, where the HCM technology provider shared a packed update on its platform and products, AI progress, and a peek into its roadmap. Now in its second year as Dayforce Discover since rebranding from its legacy ‘Ceridian Insights’ days, the flagship event brought together an energized Dayforce ecosystem and highlighted how Dayforce is creating and amplifying value at scale for its stakeholders.

Around the event, you might have noticed that Dayforce’s branding has recently been updated, taking on a much more youthful, fun slant (aligning well with its UI/UX). Very purposeful branding that Dayforce hopes emphasizes its enthusiasm and authenticity in “making work life better” and empowering people to “do the work they were meant to do” – each central to ‘the Dayforce way.’

Dayforce isn’t just slapping paint on the old Ceridian; they're doubling down on their ecosystem and, more importantly, tripling down on its customers. Chief-Daymaker and CEO David Ossip emphasized this by sharing his contact information during the opening keynote. Emphasizing to customers: “We see you, we hear you, we are approachable and here to respond when you call.”

It's something customers are no strangers to, as a few told me they have reached out in past years, to an immediate response and engagement. A rare CX in today’s marketplace, regardless of sector.  But for Dayforce, it’s a cultural norm and an approach its entire executive team embraces, and is evident by its 98% retention rate.

New to the Dayforce AI-Powered People Platform

The products were plenty this year with Dayforce unveiling several notable additions and enhancements, plus many more coming on the roadmap.

UX reboot

First, the UI/UX continues its perpetual makeover.  Dayforce’s Chief of Strategy, Product & Technology, Joe Korngiebel, likens the firm’s approach to its UX to maintaining the Golden Gate Bridge, where the bridge's size and harsh conditions require continuous repainting.  Meaning that the Dayforce UX will always be in a state of constant advancement and refreshment. 

I enjoyed a private demo of the new UX and my immediate perception went to a very social media feel. A widget-style, dashboard experience that leverages the Dayforce AI Assistant for deep personalization, insights, nudges, and guidance to support users across personas.

AI progress

With Dayforce keenly focused on “AI doing the work for you” there were no shortage of agentic AI updates.  It’s also important to note that Dayforce has been laying the foundation to enable its robust AI ambitions for years.  Its infrastructure and data model are a differentiator that the team has patiently curated.  This isn’t AI lip service – I’ve attended Dayforce’s analyst events as part of my HCM tech research since 2016, and this has always been a notable takeaway and key area of discipline that Dayforce prides itself on.  

The foundation is well in order and primed for Dayforce innovation against the ‘hard stuff’ in HR and payroll.  Building on this progress, Dayforce announced multiple AI agents, including:

• People Analytic agents: access role-based workforce insights and data, including graphs and charts for insights in the flow of work

• Content authoring agents: helps to draft HR related content including goals, policies, job descriptions, or employee communications

• Pay agents: help employee understand pay details, providing transparency and reduced inquiries for payroll and HR

• Time agents: provide visibility into schedules, shifts, PTO balances, while maintaining compliance and policy requirements.

Other AI powered solutions included the new Dayforce AI learning Course Creator, offering guided learning and course content creation, including charts, images, and video.  It also announced HR Service Delivery Handoff to enable transitions from the Dayforce AI Assistant to a human HR business partner without losing context. Plus, AI-powered tools for skills mapping, career development, and learning.

AI planned in 2026

Next up for Dayforce includes a continued focus on advancing its UX, including a refresh of its mobile app and experience, and of course, more AI agents to solve complex, routine, and repetitive HR tasks across the platform. Including AI-enabled anomaly detection for surfacing and addressing potential payroll, tax, compliance, and data errors.

Along the AI front Dayforce AI Workspace is planned. A human and AI collaboration environment for addressing workforce challenges.  The solution provides a collection of agentic-enabled use cases with contextual and personalized insights.  Key Dayforce AI Workspace solutions demonstrated include Compliance Monitoring, which ‘orbits’ the practitioner user to surface, guide, and support action on compliance updates and regularity changes.

Dayforce AI Workspace includes a new Performance Management coach. An AI-enabled coach offering contextual, role-play style guidance and feedback for first-time managers to prepare and deliver more impactful and effective performance and career-related discussions. Other use cases include employee milestone guidance around career and life events, employee action plans and collaboration, and HR analysis and reporting with real-time graphical analytics.

Lastly, but notably, Dayforce plans to become the “intelligent front door” for its customers and will offer deeper AI interoperability with common AI apps and solutions in the workplace like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot in 2026.

Strategic Workforce Planning

This year was a packed updates, but most notably was the acquisition announcement of Agentnoon that will bring Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) to the fold.  The AI native organizational design and planning platform helps companies visualize, model, and optimize their organizational structure, including headcount, roles, and reporting relationships. It also provides “what-if” scenario planning, allowing leaders to simulate decisions (hiring, org redesigns, skills forecasting, etc) in real time and collaboratively with peers.

The addition of SWP pairs nicely with Dayforce’s broader HCM capabilities, but more importantly, with its workforce management (WFM) and advanced scheduling capabilities native to the platform.  Collectively, HCM, WFM, SWP, and Dayforce Analytics will enable their future plans and vision of enabling a ‘continuous planning’ capability.

Global payroll gets democratized

A much-welcomed announcement is the opening of its platform to offer global payroll scale for its customers.  Already a formidable global payroll solution with native gross to net continuous calc engines across three continents with Mexico and Germany due next.

Through its Dayforce Payroll Interface (an open standards framework) Dayforce is now allowing customers to connect any 3^rd party payroll solution, offering a single orchestration layer and consolidated view of payroll data globally within the Dayforce platform.

A little overdue but well timed as enterprise firms are more commonly seeking a plug-and-play approach to solving their payroll needs globally and want choice and agility in doing so. The bi-directional APIs and data exchange enable customers to access globally consolidated payroll data and insights in real time, while providing flexibility to meet their unique payroll needs.  

The Dayforce GTM and Outlook

Dayforce has sharpened its GTM pencil, refocusing sales density in key markets like Australia, Germany, and the U.K., which, along with its product maturity and partner marketplace, is fueling its global growth.

The addition of SWP means Dayforce can now tell an expanded value story, and target and support more executive personas and their key use cases, including the office of the CFO and CIO. However, don’t expect to see Dayforce shift its focus toward building ERP products – it’s executive leadership is keenly focused on solving the many deep-rooted challenges in the HCM space for the long term.

Dayforce is also looking to its partners to assist in enabling more growth, particularly as it scales further beyond North America and amongst larger enterprise buyers.  Partners will need to play an increasingly key role as Dayforce is still managing the bulk of its platform deployments (~60%) and aiming to flip that with SI’s leading the majority of its activations and maturing toward an SI-first strategy to support scale.  

Expect to see more partnerships like Dayforce’s expanded engagement with Microsoft.  Beyond agentic AI interoperability, Dayforce (a top 50 Microsoft partner) will pair its HCM tech with Microsoft Dynamics 365 for an HCM+ERP co-selling opportunity, including aligned roadmaps. Look for more to come from firms that can co-sell and co-innovate alongside Dayforce.

It’s also doubling down on its customers and the internal addressable market they represent.  Dayforce is leaning into Customer Success Managers to support its customers as strategic partners in helping them maximize their investments and expand their adoption of Dayforce products.

Talent modules maturing along with customers

While Dayforce is well entrenched on the core side of its customer HR, it has more work to do to mature and support the full HCM spectrum for its clients.  I spoke to half a dozen clients using much of the platform but only select modules from its talent-related solutions.  Each was a seasoned customer with varying complexity, who started with Dayforce in its Ceridian days and has matured alongside the platform.  All of them pointed to plans to engage more Dayforce modules and acknowledge the progress Dayforce has made with its ‘Grow’ segment of the platform. Performance, Learning, and Skills all topped the list of future buying plans. 

New customers are also engaging with the full capability of Dayforce more frequently, with a majority of new deals derived from full suite adopters, with many enterprise deals now including a full suite opportunity. 

Agility-enabling solutions like Dayforce Flex Work (now available in the U.S. and U.K., with Canada coming in 2026) are supporting Dayforce clients by opening talent channels through its contingent workforce platform, connecting employer staffing needs to skilled, flexible, temporary, and gig/contingent workers for access to ‘talent in the flow of business.  

Differentiated for complexity

Where some peers have avoided it, Dayforce has stayed laser-focused on leaning in and owning the gritty, complex, but essential components of HR: time, payroll, benefits, and most importantly, compliance.  Dayforce’s discipline on the core architecture of its platform and emphasis on compliance have quietly positioned it well to build on a differentiated foundation and create more value from engaging its entire platform and especially its AI.

In this way, Dayforce is particularly well-suited for firms in high complexity sectors.  Those with heavy front-line populations, union requirements, or unique industry nuances such as healthcare, retail, manufacturing, etc. The Government of Canada is a proof point of an organization that brought unique complexity and found Dayforce could best accommodate that complexity and support its future direction. It’s increasingly winning these buyers against notable upmarket HCM competitors.

Another key area of differentiation and growth is Dayforce’s deep multi-country localizations and ability to support global organizations with tech and managed services.  Dayforce offers a unique global time and payroll (plus compliance) value proposition that very few of its peers can point to, which it can offer as a standalone (time, pay, or both) or as part of its broader HCM platform adoption.  

The heavy lift in most payroll operations in front-line heavy sectors (manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, retail) lies within the build-to-gross or source-to-gross activities (scheduling, approvals, time and attendance) vs. the actual gross-to-net calculation or processing. Post-processing compliance takes this complexity further and requires localized expertise and services infrastructure.

The ability to solve for all of this in a single, native cloud platform and vendor solution, with managed compliance services underpinning its tech, is unique amongst its HCM peers and something Dayforce knows well from its deep managed services heritage. A focus area where Dayforce is winning and showing its value. Its customer Orica is an example.  While the firm leverages a competitor’s core HR solution, Dayforce was chosen to support its time and payroll needs for more than 12.5k employees in over 47 countries.

Understandably, Dayforce needs to sell more full-suite HCM; however, a global WFM and global payroll value proposition is an excellent pathway to meeting buyers ‘where they are’ for a land-and-expand opportunity by solving their most complex challenges first.

Look for Dayforce to lean further into developing and expanding its compliance layer with additional use cases for AI (e.g., Dayforce Compliance Monitor) and enabling its managed services to support more countries.  Expanded services are also possible; I could see the potential for Dayforce eventually bringing together its talent (Flex Work), global payroll, payments (Dayforce Wallet), and compliance capabilities for a longer-term Global Mobility solution or services offering. 

Dayforce’s ability to continue to meet customers of all sizes, complexities, and geography, with a full suite of HCM  technology to ‘orchestrate’ the many complex use cases of modern organizations, underpinned by a proven managed services offering to orbit adopting businesses and derisk their strategic paths, is well built for the unpredictable road ahead.  

For more on Dayforce Discover, see the recent HR & Payroll 2.0 podcast episode detailing the updates and learnings from the event!