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Our conversation with UKG’s CMO Sarah Hodges, unpacking why she joined, how “Workforce Operating Platform” reframes the category, and what modern marketers must do as AI reshapes discovery.
Check out the full interview here
When Sarah Hodges talks about reaching her first anniversary as Chief Marketing Officer at UKG, she sounds both surprised and energized. The year moved fast, she said, because the work has been intense and genuinely fun. That pace makes sense once you hear the context. Sarah stepped into UKG at a moment when the company had changed dramatically inside its walls, but the outside world had not fully absorbed that change yet.
Her background is classic B2B SaaS, but across industries that rely on large frontline workforces, including construction and manufacturing. That experience gave her a close view of the realities of hourly and distributed teams. When she looked at UKG, she saw a company with deep relevance to the frontline and a rare branding opportunity.
“UKG is still relatively new… I felt like this was a marketer's dream in terms of being able to really put some momentum behind the reintroduction of UKG to the world.””
UKG formed from the Ultimate Software and Kronos merger about five years ago. Since then, the platform has evolved, investments have accelerated, and the company has been reshaping how it serves customers. Sarah joined to help translate that internal transformation into a clear external narrative.
Sarah explained that brand strategy work was already in motion when she arrived, but what remained fuzzy was the simplest and hardest question: who is UKG today?
Answering that required months of definition and repositioning. The team worked to clarify differentiators, sharpen the story, and make the market understand UKG as it exists now, not as it existed right after the merger.
“What had not been done was… the crystallization of who are we and how do we tell the world who we are as UKG today.”
Once that foundation was set, everything downstream followed quickly. Visual identity, tone, imagery, messaging, and a new website all came together in a relatively short window. Sarah credited her team for making it happen and described the whole process as a high-energy sprint that stayed rooted in strategy first.
“Very quickly it evolved into visual ID, look and feel, how we show up in terms of our tone, our visual representation, our imagery.”
One of the clearest signals of UKG’s refreshed positioning is the phrase “Workforce Operating Platform.” When I asked Sarah about it, she described it as a deliberate evolution of how the company wants to be understood.
Human Capital Management remains central to UKG’s identity. At the same time, UKG believes organizations need more than traditional HR systems to run effectively. HR teams, frontline operations, and payroll leaders all rely on workforce data, and the best decisions happen when insights connect across those areas.
“Human capital management is still a huge component of what we do… [Workforce operating platform] is not a departure from the HCM space. It’s more of an evolution and in fact an accelerator.”
She framed the term as a way to express the integrated reality of workforce planning and execution. Scheduling and time, HR data, and payroll information are not separate in practice. UKG’s platform is built to let customers see the full picture and act on it.
AI is now a core part of workforce tech, and Sarah spoke candidly about how complicated that can feel for customers. She hears the uncertainty directly from organizations and employees, especially on the frontline. People worry about what AI means for their jobs, how decisions are being made, and whether they are being left behind.
“There is a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt… around what role is AI going to play and whether it might make one feel less relevant or displaced.”
UKG’s approach centers on what Sarah called “people-first AI.” The company treats AI as a partner that supports workers by taking on routine or tedious tasks. The aim is to free people to focus on higher-value work and to help frontline employees feel more capable, not more threatened.
“We look at AI as an assistant, an accelerator… to augment your abilities.”
She also emphasized transparency. Frontline teams can feel far from corporate strategy, and that distance can magnify fear when new technology shows up without context. UKG believes that involving employees in AI deployment builds trust and ownership.
“When you feel part of something and your fingerprints are on it, you have more authorship over it.”
That mindset shapes how UKG talks about AI and how it builds AI into products. The message is consistent. The technology is there to help people do more, not to reduce their importance.
Our conversation also turned to a challenge every B2B marketing leader is feeling right now. Search traffic is dropping, not because teams stopped producing great content, but because the way people discover information has changed. Sarah described seeing the same trend we have at OutSail, including a meaningful year-over-year decline tied to zero-click behavior.
“We had the exact same scenario… our metrics declined significantly… a result of zero-click search.”
Her response has been to shift the marketing engine toward credibility and distribution. UKG is leaning harder into thought leadership anchored in third-party validation. Analyst perspectives, accredited research, and commissioned studies all help AI systems pull UKG into answers.
“Leaning on content that includes validated content or third-party accredited content really helps us… still continue to be served up.”
The team is also more selective about which topics to pursue and how to frame them. The goal is to earn relevance through substance, not volume. Inside the marketing org, they are using AI as a speed layer. First drafts come faster, and the saved time goes into ideas, refinement, and originality.
“It generates more ideas and more time to be innovative… you just build on that.”
For marketers, the job is shifting toward trust building, narrative clarity, and showing up in more places than a blog and a search result.
As search becomes less reliable, UKG has expanded into a full omni-channel mix. Sarah highlighted something interesting here. Some of the best performing tactics have been “older school” channels executed with modern creativity.
Direct mail is one example. Campaigns that use video mailers, high-touch physical moments, or celebratory deliveries have proven effective for their audience. Out-of-home advertising is another major bet, especially in airports and high-traffic spaces where short, memorable messages create brand recognition.
“We’ve actually returned to some of the things that feel, dare I say, older school. Direct mail is actually really, really effective.”
“Out of Home… I think it’s having a moment.”
UKG is pairing those investments with deeper LinkedIn engagement, more in-person executive forums, and community-driven partnerships. Sarah called out the company’s Aston Martin and F1 collaboration as a way to bring customers and prospects together in meaningful settings where trust and peer learning matter.
The guiding belief is simple. If AI is compressing the funnel at the top, then brand, relationships, and multi-channel presence become the long-term advantage.
Sarah’s first year at UKG captures what modern SaaS marketing leadership looks like. She walked into transformation, clarified the company’s identity, and guided a rebrand rooted in strategy. She helped redefine how UKG describes its platform, with the frontline as a central focus. She framed AI in human terms and pushed for transparency as a driver of adoption. She also embraced the reality that SEO is changing for good, and she is building a broader distribution engine to meet that shift head-on.
UKG’s rebrand is a statement about what the company has become and where it believes workforce technology is going next. If the momentum of year one is any signal, there is a lot more coming.
