Case Study
UST accelerated staffing and performance cycles with AI-driven employee insights
OUR CLIENT
UST is an AI-driven digital transformation and IT services provider with more than 25 years of experience supporting the world’s largest enterprises. With more than 30,000 employees across 30+ countries, UST partners with its clients from design to operation to deliver solutions spanning cloud, data, intelligent automation, and managed cybersecurity at enterprise scale.
THE CHALLENGE
Cumbersome, time-consuming, inconsistent talent management processes
UST managers faced growing difficulty making timely, fair, well-informed people decisions. The challenges were two-pronged:
Difficulty profiling talent for speedy project assignments
UST managers needed a quick, holistic view of employees to make decisions on project/internal mobility allocation, performance, compensation, and talent identification. However, the HR solutions platform required managers to navigate multiple screens and reports, slowing decision making and often missing context. This situation required manual effort to gather insights, a time-consuming process. Additionally, there was limited visibility on achievements and readiness throughout the year, which often led to recency bias. The result was delayed staffing assignments and underutilized talent. Managers explicitly highlighted this as a major pain point for quick decision-making and supervising teams.
Inconsistent, time-consuming employee feedback cycles
UST managers also struggled to create high-quality, consistent, and unbiased performance feedback. The quality of feedback heavily depended on individual writing styles, manual and subjective recall of recent interactions, and time constraints. This caused fairness issues, delays in performance review cycles, and inconsistent talent calibration across the organization. Given the significant effort required to prepare feedback, evaluation submissions were slow and often lacked context from different points of view. Recency bias also overshadowed full-year performance. This situation prevented managers from gaining a holistic view of performance and clearly communicating strengths and development areas for employees. Managers wanted a simpler way to provide standardized feedback at any time.
THE TRANSFORMATION
Delivering AI-assisted performance management solutions
UST’s People Systems Team from the IT and HR departments knew that AI could solve both challenges.
UST Quickprofile.ai: Using AI for workforce decision-making
To address the talent profiling issue, the project team designed and built a custom AI model integrated with Workday that quickly summarizes an employee’s performance history in about 60 seconds. Quickprofile.ai employee summaries include:
- Career and job profile insights
- Compensation history and equity indicators
- Check-ins, feedback, and achievements
- Learning and skill signals
- Drill-down capabilities to the underlying Workday data for validation
The AI solution is tightly integrated with Workday’s security and data boundaries, ensuring compliance and data privacy.
UST Feedbackassistant.ai: AI-driven employee insights
The team built a custom generative AI (GenAI) model that’s integrated with Workday to automate the creation of employee performance feedback narratives. The GenAI tool:
- Creates and refines feedback automatically from historical check-ins and achievements
- Standardizes the writing style of performance narratives
- Provides human-in-the-loop AI safeguards because managers can edit and approve feedback summaries
- Seamlessly integrates with the UST Quickprofile.ai tool to provide holistic employee insights
THE IMPACT
Accelerating performance reviews by 50% and delivering two market-ready Workday solutions
Both AI-based solutions provided immediate, measurable benefits to UST.
UST Quickprofile.ai
The solution reduced the time to complete employee profile reviews by approximately 60%. Managers can now make more informed, faster staffing decisions with audit-ready information backed by Workday source data.
UST Feedbackassistant.ai
The solution led to 50% faster feedback cycles. The GenAI solution enables managers to generate performance narratives at half the time of the previous manual writing process. The solution also boosted fairness and consistency across performance reviews by eliminating personal and recency bias, as well as varied writing styles. Managers can calibrate performance and make talent decisions from a more standardized, uniform perspective.
The project team estimated that the company has avoided approximately 95% in Workday AI licensing fees. Both solutions are available to all 30,000+ UST employees, which would have been cost-prohibitive under the typical per-user SaaS application fee structure.
Because UST developed and validated both solutions internally, Quickprofile.ai and Feedbackassistant.ai are pressure-tested solutions available to the broader marketplace. What began as internal solutions to resolve employee pain points has become innovative Workday add-on solutions for our clients.
Learn more about our Workday practice and how our experts can help your organization resolve your talent management challenges.
RESOURCES
https://www.ust.com/content/dam/ust/documents/ust-and-workday-whitepaper.pdf