Whilst ~130 people joined the ADP Innovation Day New York to hear updates on ADP product investments, I had an interesting conversation with CEO Maria Black in the corridor. We discussed why “big” matters and whether being the largest payroll provider in the world with 75 years’ experience really makes a difference. Arguably, the market may be tired of hearing about ADP’s size at every meeting. However, with rapid advances in AI-driven processes, the pure size of ADP alone is likely to offer it a very distinct advantage as it advances machine learning capabilities across its client and product bases. This is the first issue I wanted to explore at the ADP Innovation Day.

As well as its size, ADP is often considered conservative, placing great emphasis on security and having one of the strongest compliance and security frameworks in the industry. A challenge for the ADP product team is to reconcile how the security conscious organization can advance in an AI world where sensitive personal data including financial information is involved. I was curious to see how far ADP has come in its AI journey and where it is investing next.

The second question I wanted to explore is how far ADP has progressed in its journey to achieve the trifecta of offering Global Pay, Global Time and Global HCM. With its recent acquisition of WorkForce Software and launch of Lyric HCM, ADP is growing its capability to support this trifecta of offerings.

Below are my takeaways on AI, innovation and ADP’s global offerings.

ADP’s AI Vision

ADP designs AI-infused products to be Easy (transactions), Smart (with data insights) and Human (experience). AI is powered by ADP OneData and will be included in all key products, i.e. Global Payroll, Lyric HCM, Workforce Now, Workforce Management, ADP RUN, all at no additional cost.

ADP’s AI Assist assistant focuses on chat (e.g. employee questions on pay and pay compliance), insights (e.g. nudges, reporting) and actions (e.g. payroll anomalies). Going forward, AI workflows will evolve to agentic AI offerings. The new ADP Agent control center enables agent actions and scripts to be reviewed with full chat transcripts available. Special mention goes to the AI Feedback tool where users can elect for actions to be automatically repeated for similar cases as part of AI learning user preferences. AI Assist is also now available for payroll practitioners on mobile devices, for instance to highlight payroll anomalies.

The sign of a robust platform is managing errors when things go wrong. The feedback mechanism of ADP Assist has improved, as has user adoption and experience regarding accuracy and reporting on unanswered questions.

Innovation Approach

ADP is broadening its approach to innovation to support greater speed to market, and has introduced a Build/Buy/Partner and Invest approach. Traditionally, ADP focused on building proprietary software, but in 2025 there is a greater emphasis on the partner community as it scales up to support Lyric deployments. Its recent acquisition of WorkForce Software demonstrates ADP is taking a more flexible route to market. As part of its ADP Ventures initiative, a number of companies were introduced to the audience, including Nayya and Ema.

The ADP Marketplace has also been a source for innovation. With API Central, the marketplace options for integration offer greater ability to scale solutions. Flexspring is a partner organization that has been working with ADP to help build API data integrations, data caching and data governance. It supports API connections across multiple countries, the technology is already available in the U.K., Germany and France, and most recently Italy was added.

Global Product Offerings

Global Payroll: ADP processes 112m payslips in its ADP Global Payroll offering, representing 24% growth over the last 3 years. Its largest client in a single country has 108k employees. Highlights were the first wave of SAP clients on Global View migrating to Rise, representing 53 clients. Wave 2 is planned for 2025. ADP Assist for practitioners for payroll variances is also available, and coming soon are ADP Assist for employees and ADP Assist nudges. ADP Assist for legislative updates and data validation is planned for 2026.

Global HCM: Lyric HCM is ADP’s latest HCM product supporting organizations with 1k+ employees for both the U.S. and elsewhere: 243 clients have already taken up Lyric HCM across 38 countries, the largest client with 55k employees. Features updates include data conversion tools using AI for field mapping and position budgeting tools based on compensation data. Lyric customers were center stage to answer questions and confirmed they are using ADP Assist in pilot mode and also feeding back user questions to ADP to support its product development.

Global Time: Following the acquisition of WorkForce Software and its flagship product, the WorkForce Suite, ADP is consolidating its Workforce Management (WFM) offerings and embedding the WorkForce Suite in its strategic HCM platforms for the upmarket – Workforce Now, Lyric HCM and Global Payroll. As a result of the acquisition, the number of client employees served by ADP’s WFM solutions across all platforms grew +40% YoY to ~20M. The WorkForce Suite supports wage and hour rules in 100+ countries and is offered in 25+ languages. Other strategic products in the ADP WFM portfolio include ADP RUN Timekeeping plus Scheduling for small businesses, ADP Workforce Now WorkForce Management for the mid- to up-market and the ADP Kiosk device and ADP Time Kiosk app, to complement ADP’s traditional time clocks, mobile app and desktop solutions for user access.

Other product news: ADP announced a 10-year extension to its UKG agreement for licensing Workforce Manager to enable continued support to clients using the UKG product. It will stop selling UKG Workforce Manager in September 2026. eTime has a new end of life timeframe of September 2030. 

WorkforceNow updates: This product supports +90K live clients with 15m client employees paid per month, with core capability covering continuous payroll calculation, anomaly detection, and compensation service offerings. AI is being applied to onboarding new clients. Plus, ADP Assist is already embedded in the product and will support new features such as quick searches, where searching through reports is no longer required, and an improved recruitment experience enabling cross-client talent pools, candidate CV feedback, and alternative job recommendations.

Predictions

• Expect more from ADP Assist: ADP has 67k employees serving 42m client employees across 140+ countries and territories and 14m users on the ADP app. With this size, expect ADP to drive ADP Assist through its platforms at pace, backed by the human in the loop as it validates responses offline with a strong compliance organization. ADP Assist will be the glue across the technologies, working cross-platform and will be multi-modal (voice/visual and text)
• As the ADP products’ user experiences merge, it is becoming harder to differentiate the products. Expect ADP products to expand up and down market as it consolidates its technologies
• Expect to see increased global time functionality filtering into global payroll dashboards, offering not just wage explanations but drill-downs to time data to address bottlenecks, anomalies, trends and data insights.