UKG simplifies post-merger complexity with ServiceNow and Tanium

In 2020, no blueprint existed for doing an industry-changing merger remotely during a pandemic. Pulling it off to create UKG, a global market-leading AI platform unifying HR, pay, and workforce management, was a major accomplishment.

UKG powers how work gets done for more than 80,000 organizations, and tens of millions of employees worldwide, from the front office to the frontline, touch UKG every day. Its industry-first Workforce Operating Platform unifies time, pay, scheduling, and workforce data with people-first AI to help organizations take action in real time, match labor to demand, and get work done more efficiently. With deep roots in frontline work and customers in every industry from SMBs to two-thirds of the Fortune 1000—including ServiceNow and Tanium—UKG runs mission-critical workforce operations where execution, accuracy, and employee experience directly impact business outcomes.

“Our internal IT team’s top priority is delivering scalable solutions and a frictionless digital experience for our employees as they focus on what matters most: taking care of our customers,” says Adam Zaulyczny, Senior Director, Enterprise Solutions & Experience at UKG.

Making sure employees have the tools to best serve UKG’s customers includes ensuring IT operations are collaborative, efficient, and innovative. Reducing duplicative systems, standardizing processes, and shifting IT away from reactive incident management took center stage following the 2020 merger. “And to do all that, we needed to gain real-time visibility into trustworthy data,” says Zaulyczny.

To support this vision, Zaulyczny led a strategic effort to simplify and modernize UKG’s IT operations with ServiceNow AI Platform at the core. His team set out to reduce complexity, improve visibility, and create a more agile foundation for innovation—one that could better serve employees, especially those who were customer-facing.

“With an excessive number of tools and variable processes coming together in a merger, that can create an inconsistent and frustrating employee experience,” says Zaulyczny. “We needed to mitigate that.” But deciding which tools to keep and how to standardize processes required good data.

Upleveling IT operations with AI and automation

UKG’s IT team designed a strategic initiative to address challenges like duplicative tooling, which caused conflicting and disparate data, while continuously improving experiences for employees across departments, including its own. Through a phased approach, Zaulyczny set his team’s sights on transforming IT operations using AI, from patchworked data and reactive to data-driven and proactive—and, ultimately, predictive.

When ServiceNow and Tanium announced their partnership, Zaulyczny’s plan accelerated.

“That's when we combined the strengths of Tanium and the ServiceNow AI Platform,” says Zaulyczny. IT had started using Tanium to obtain real-time endpoint intelligence and was gaining high confidence in its trustworthiness. They also had a strong ServiceNow foundation across their ecosystem, particularly with ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM).

To reduce the volume of reactive IT incidents, Zaulycny’s team used the Service Graph Connector for Tanium connected to the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to continuously feed asset inventory, deduplicate end-user tooling, and standardize ITSM processes. “By integrating Tanium’s real-time endpoint intelligence with CMDB,” says Zaulycny, “we established a single system of action that drives operational clarity and efficiency. This allowed us to eliminate duplicative tools, establish consistent workflows, and build strong trust in the data gleaned through the integration of Tanium and ServiceNow.” They then applied Tanium intelligence to drive automation in ServiceNow, targeting the most common problems. 

With Tanium’s introduction of Autonomous Endpoint Management (AEM), Zaulyczny and his team are now focusing on expanding these efficiencies and driving towards autonomous IT. Tanium continually surfaces hardware and application data and sends it to ServiceNow, which uses AI Agents to automatically identify and create workflows to resolve issues in real time. For example, Tanium’s real-time endpoint visibility and actionability fuel AI agents in ServiceNow to proactively resolve collaboration tool issues before employees even notice them. By detecting patterns such as cache buildup and application instability, Tanium triggers automated fixes—like clearing the cache or restarting apps—and, by utilizing Now Assist skills with the power of GenAI, eliminates the need for IT tickets or technician involvement, lowering the time it takes to resolve issues by 67%. This seamless platform integration has significantly improved the employee experience and operational efficiency.

“For a large organization like UKG, seeing what’s happening and taking enterprise-wide action in seconds is critical for containing risk and ensuring availability,” says Saqib Khan, Field CIO at Tanium.

From reactive to strategic—slashing break-fix incident volume with real-time IT insights

Once tools were deduplicated and standardized processes established, reducing reactive incidents became a top priority for Zaulyczny’s team. UKG’s IT organization handled more than 150,000 reactive break-fix incidents per year in 2023.

After deep-diving into Tanium data and ServiceNow workflows, and by focusing on its CMDB and asset management, Zaulyczny’s team helped transition IT from a reactive state to a much more productive, prepared one. “With the Tanium-ServiceNow integration, we significantly reduced the volume of ‘break-fix’ issues by 70% over a two-year period, freeing up IT teams to concentrate on value-added innovation and strategic issues rather than incident management,” says Zaulyczny. Today, most IT operations decisions are based on real-time and runtime data with IT Operations Management (ITOM). Zaulyczny’s team has also used process mining and Automated Work Assignment to achieve 85% automated routing of inbound work items—driving smarter triage, accelerating service delivery, and elevating the overall efficiency of Tier 1 operations, with an 80% first contact resolution rate.

Implementing fully predictive operations for IT and beyond

The next stop on Zaulyczny’s roadmap is predictive operations; his team’s goal is to help IT prevent issues from happening at all by identifying emerging patterns and providing anticipatory fixes. As part of this evolution, he sees the recent adoption of RaptorDB Pro as a critical foundation for scaling future automation and agentic workflows, ensuring the platform can support faster insights and more reliable predictive operations. “RaptorDB Pro gives us the performance and stability we need to take the next step toward true predictive and automated operations,” Zaulyczny says.

They also envision a self-service support model where employees can interact with AI agents and receive an immediate fix, leading to rapid first-call resolution, significant reductions in reactive incidents, and further freeing up IT experts to continue focusing on more strategic work.

By using the unique, real-time intelligence from Tanium within the ServiceNow AI Platform, UKG can build workflows that can detect, diagnose, and resolve internal IT issues before they disrupt the business. Says Zaulyczny, “We’ve gone way beyond the question of ‘how do we become more efficient’? Our goal is to do all we can to help our employees do what matters most, which is to take care of our customers and focus on more transformational work for our company.”