UKG is taking a different approach to AI adoption. According to the company’s CIO, employees have already created 387 AI tools and more than 12,000 AI agents after the company gave employees broad access to AI technologies. Instead of waiting for a centralized IT team to develop every solution, employees are identifying operational problems and building their own AI workflows.

For managers, this is a useful model for AI adoption. The most valuable use cases may come from people who deal with repetitive problems every day. A manager can encourage teams to identify tasks that consume time — reporting, document reviews, customer responses, data collection or internal knowledge searches — and experiment with AI solutions. The manager’s role then becomes setting boundaries around security, data and quality while helping successful experiments scale.