ADP Lyric HCM - Intelligent HCM

After more than 75 years of shaping the world of payroll and HR, ADP has made a bold move. In September 2024, the company formally launched ADP Lyric HCM - a cloud-native, AI-powered Human Capital Management platform built from the ground up for large enterprises. This is not a repackaged legacy system. Lyric represents years of development and a genuine rethinking of what enterprise HCM software should look like in the modern era.

Since its launch, Lyric has rapidly gained recognition. It was named a Top HR Product of 2025 by HR Executive - a prestigious accolade from one of the industry's most respected publications. Analyst firm Nucleus Research also named it a Leader in its Enterprise HCM Value Matrix 2025 evaluation. For a platform still in its early commercial stages, that is a strong start.

HCM for the Way Work Actually Happens Today

One of the most common frustrations with traditional HCM platforms is that they were designed around rigid organisational hierarchies - neat reporting lines and fixed structures that simply do not reflect how many businesses operate today. Workday, Oracle, and SAP were all built in an era where those structures were the norm.

Lyric takes a fundamentally different approach. Its graph-based architecture is designed to model real-world structures and relationships - teams that change, employees who report to multiple managers, contract workers sitting alongside permanent staff, and organisations that are constantly reorganising. The result is a platform that adapts to how businesses actually run, rather than forcing businesses to reshape themselves to fit the software.

HR industry analyst Josh Bersin described Lyric as being "architected for the dynamic nature of enterprises, designed around teams not hierarchies" - a phrase that neatly captures the philosophy behind the platform.

A Full HCM Suite Solution

Lyric brings together a wide range of capabilities into a single unified platform. Core functions include:

• Global HR and payroll - with support for payroll in 75+ countries, expanding quarterly

• Time and attendance, employee scheduling, and absence management

• Talent management including performance, succession, and compensation

• Benefits administration with self-service and decision support tools

• Recruitment and onboarding

• Learning and development

• Analytics and workforce intelligence, including 100+ industry-standard metrics and AI-driven storyboards

• An employee experience platform with personalised communications and milestone recognition

That breadth, delivered on a cloud-native platform with robust security and GDPR compliance built in, is a meaningful step forward for ADP's enterprise offering.

AI Is Central, Not an Add-On

Lyric comes with ADP Assist - a generative AI layer that runs across the platform. ADP Assist is not a chatbot bolted onto a legacy interface. It uses ADP's dataset of over 41 million employee records to deliver contextual, data-grounded insights. Capabilities include:

-       Payroll anomaly detection and automated resolution suggestions

-       Simplified analytics and natural-language reporting

-       HR support for employees - answering questions and guiding decisions

-       Intelligent workflow automation to reduce administrative burden

-       AI-enabled implementation tools to accelerate time-to-value for new customers

The combination of AI capability and the depth of ADP's underlying data is a genuine differentiator. Few vendors can match the scale and quality of the benchmarks ADP can draw on when generating workforce insights.

Growing Global Reach

Following its 2024 launch in the United States, ADP has moved quickly to extend Lyric's geographic footprint. In December 2025, Lyric was deployed in Australia and New Zealand - with the platform tailored to address regional compliance requirements and local workplace practices.

Also in November 2025, ADP integrated WorkForce Suite - the workforce management product it acquired in 2024 and which has been ranked number one by Nucleus Research for 11 consecutive years - directly into Lyric HCM. This brings time and attendance, employee scheduling, absence management, and workforce analytics into the platform for organisations with 150 or more employees across 140+ countries.

The pace of this expansion suggests ADP is serious about positioning Lyric as a genuinely global enterprise platform, not just a US product with international payroll capabilities layered on top. The UK is coming soon too.

What This Means for the HCM Market

Lyric reached general availability for organisations with 1,000 or more employees and had already accumulated over 120 large enterprise accounts at the time of its public launch. Capstone Logistics, an early customer, noted that Lyric gave them "the ability to seamlessly scale" through a period of organic growth and acquisition activity - a good real-world test of the platform's flexibility claims.

ADP occupies an unusual position in the HR technology market. It has the brand credibility, global payroll infrastructure, and data assets that few vendors can replicate - but for years its enterprise software offering has not always reflected that underlying strength. Lyric changes that picture. It is a platform that takes ADP's foundational strengths - payroll precision, compliance expertise, and data depth - and wraps them in a modern, AI-infused, flexible architecture designed for how enterprises actually operate today.

For enterprise technology buyers evaluating HCM platforms, Lyric deserves a place on the shortlist. And for the market more broadly, it is a reminder that established players with deep domain expertise and strong data assets can still produce genuinely innovative products when they make the investment

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If you are looking for a new HCM solution, why not let Viewpoint Analysis help. Here are a few areas worth looking at:

• If you are in the 'read-up and research' phase and just looking for HCM and HR technology ideas, take a look at our HR Technology Guides to learn more about the area.

• If replacing your HR technology is a requirement now, Viewpoint Analysis run super-quick RFI and RFP processes to find and select HR for companies of all sizes and in all industries. Take a look at our Find Technology area.

Our latest Enterprise Software Selection Playbook 2026 is a comprehensive guide, explaining all the steps needed to select a new HCM platform.