What applied AI really looks like inside Dayforce

There’s a certain energy in the air lately. Everywhere I go — conferences, boardrooms, LinkedIn — people want to know: What are you doing with AI?

Everyone’s peering over the fence these days, trying to see how other teams are applying it. We’re not doing it to compete, but to be inspired. That’s healthy curiosity because it pushes us toward clarity so we can move with more intention.

At Dayforce, we’ve embraced that push. As the Global Head of Advisory, I’m lucky to get a front-row seat to how organizations around the world are thinking about people, performance, and the future of work. Our job is to connect their workforce strategies to better business outcomes — to make work life better. AI is now a central part of the conversation and how we do it.

Let me be clear though: AI isn’t the point, progress is. It’s another tool we have to pursue something bigger — better insights, greater impact. We can now create more meaningful connection between people and the work that they do.

We’ve always said that we have to disrupt ourselves before we get disrupted. That mindset is integral to how we experiment, lead, and put AI to work inside our business. If you’re curious about how that’s played out, I’ll walk you through a few examples.

We didn’t start with a roadmap of AI features. We started with a question: Where can we make work life better right now? That question continues to guide how we apply AI across our business. Some of what we’ve tried has stuck; some hasn’t. But each experiment makes us, our platform, and our customers stronger.

Here are three areas where we’ve intentionally integrated AI and seen real results:

• Making the platform experience smarter and more useful to our customers
• Improving productivity, which opens up time for higher-impact work
• Levelling up our people through smarter coaching and development

When we talk about AI in the Dayforce platform, we’re talking about people using it to make better decisions and act on them faster. I don’t mean in a theoretical way, but in a “this-changed-how-I-work every day” kind of way.

For example, our AI can now flag anomalies in a pay run and detect potential turnover before it becomes a problem. In talent acquisition and development, it can surface an internal career path or direct scheduling decisions for a manager who has competing demands.

Dayforce Co-Pilot allows leaders to query their data in a natural, conversational way. They don’t need to know where to look, only what to ask. That shift from navigating to knowing is hugely powerful, and allows our customers to make faster, more informed decisions.

Internally, we’ve experimented with AI to create space for more strategic thinking, better client conversations, and faster follow-through. It’s all about removing friction and focusing on what counts.

A great example is sales demonstrations. Our advisors spend a lot of time tailoring product walkthroughs for different audiences and needs. AI allows us to build smarter first-pass flows that combine recordings, demo assets, and knowledge base content so teams can prep and personalize faster and better.

We’re using AI to handle early stage RFP and RFI responses. Instead of starting from scratch, teams get a strategic head start. That gives them much more time to focus on nuance and the parts of a proposal that really make a difference.

It’s also helping us sharpen how we present. It can analyze everything from pacing and tone to filler words and eye contact, giving our advisors feedback so they can show up with more clarity and confidence the next time.

We’re constantly looking at where our time actually goes. AI gives us a clearer picture of where further automation could have even more of a measurable impact.

The thread through all of this is freeing up time from repetitive tasks so we can double down on what’s meaningful. AI is doing that for us and it’s only accelerating.

The last way we’re applying AI might be the most important: helping our people grow.

We’ve always worked to instill a growth mindset into our company culture. But coaching at scale, especially across a global team, takes more than good intentions. It requires visibility, consistency, and timely feedback. AI gives us that in ways that simply weren’t possible before.

Gong is an important part of this. Even though it’s our revenue AI platform and designed to deliver pipeline insights and reliable forecasting, we’ve found some of its other benefits to be just as powerful. For example, Gong has become a critical part of how we identify development opportunities. It surfaces trends and gives us great advice that guides coaching conversations.

We prioritize continuous improvement, and want every team member to have visibility into where they can improve, without waiting for a quarterly review or sporadic feedback. AI is making that kind of growth feel less like a formal process and more like a daily habit. That’s where real, consistent development happens.

AI is changing fast and so are we. Our Dayforce teams will keep testing, keep adjusting, and yes, we’ll keep looking over the fence. Progress comes from inspiration and right now, the use cases for AI are incredibly inspiring. It’s how we’re helping to make work life better, both internally and for our customers.