Usman Khan’s Post

Two years ago, on October 3, 2023, we launched ADP Ventures' Corporate Venture Capital team (in compliment to our long established Venture Incubator) with a simple mandate: back the builders who make work better, and help them win with ADP’s distribution, data, and domain expertise. We set out to be an operator’s CVC: thoughtful bets, deeper partnerships, real product impact. The market has moved a lot in 2 short years since then. Budgets tightened, hype cycles came and went, and AI shifted from slideware to shipped software. Through all of it, our program has been most effective when we kept the center of gravity close to customers and outcomes; where a partnership or product integration changes someone’s day, not just a dashboard. Here’s what that taught us: - Strategy before volume. A small number of high-conviction investments has beaten “spray and pray.” The common thread: a clear line from the company’s product to ADP’s advantage: distribution, data, or both. - From dashboards to decisions. Natural-language interfaces and AI agents are already turning reporting into action. The questions are becoming “What should we do next?” and “What can we automate safely?” That’s where a scaled platform like ours can lead. - Equity plus execution. A check matters less than a path to real usage: marketplace, APIs, co-selling, shared data models. When we pair investment with product work, adoption is faster and learning is sharper. - Trust is the unlock. Enterprises adopt AI when it’s observable, governable, and auditable. We look for teams that design those controls in, and we hold our own work to the same standard. - People compound. Founder trips, operator roundtables, and hands-on build sessions aren’t side quests. They’re how we find practical problems worth solving, and shorten the distance between idea and impact. Where we’re headed next is consistent with all of the above. We’re leaning into an AI-native back office—workflows you can run in plain language, measured by the percent of tasks automated and the quality of outcomes. We’re investing in the data plumbing that makes those workflows trustworthy: semantic layers, lineage, and observability. We see room for fintech inside payroll as pay, benefits, and working capital intersect. And we’ll go deeper in the verticals where ADP’s scale is a real advantage. The promise we made at launch still holds: invest, partner, and build—with discipline. If you're working on this, we'd love to compare notes. https://lnkd.in/ghSPhveZ Sreeni Kutam, Isabel Izquierdo, Shawn Jung, Abhi Chaki, Ava Johnson, Sherry Li-Frucher, Husam (Sam) Nasser, Arunima Raavi, Veni D., Gweneth Gomez, Sadrish Acharya, Mahir Dhariwal, Lucia M., Jeremiah Johnson