Will Workday’s new AI agents set it apart from competitors?

Workday has joined the ranks of tech vendors scrambling to roll out their own agentic artificial intelligence (AI) with its announcement Tuesday of a new AI platform and several specialized AI agents.

At its Workday Rising event, the cloud-based HR and financial management company unveiled Illuminate, its next-generation AI platform, as well as four new AI agents and a Workday Assistant for HR and financial processes. It’s all part of what the company is calling a “robust three year AI roadmap.”

“A lot of top HR and ERP vendors are all in the race of producing AI agents,” said Akshara Naik Lopez, senior analyst with Forrester. “Workday is no different.”

Specific agents for specific tasks

Workday’s new Illuminate platform is powered by the more than 800 billion business transactions the company processes annually. The goal is to provide real-time AI assistance within workflows, providing each user with a “team” of AI experts, according to Workday. Generative AI helps speed up tasks, including writing knowledge pieces, job descriptions, or contracts. The platform also provides automation tools such as auto-filling, document scanning, prompting, and anomaly detection.

Integrated into this platform are four new AI agents: Recruiter, Expenses, Succession, and Optimize. Recruiter helps source candidates, recommend talent, and automate outreach and interview scheduling, according to Workday. It can also provide insights into candidate profiles. The company reported that customers are already seeing a 25% increase in recruiter capacity.

Expenses Agent “virtually eliminates” the need for manual expense reporting, as it creates, submits, and approves reports, Workday said. This can help cut down on the hundreds of thousands of dollars companies spend annually to correct expense report errors.

Succession Agent automates the succession planning process by prompting managers to update succession plans, automatically recommending successors, and generating personalized development plans. Optimize Agent helps identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and deviations from a company’s best practices.

With the exception of Recruiter (available now in Workday’s recent acquisition, HiredScore), the agents will be available in 2025.

“Taking out excess business transaction and processing time gives the employee more time to spend on other aspects of their job,” said Mickey North Rizza, group VP for IDC’s enterprise software group. “The productivity and efficiency improvements are vast across human resources, finance, planning, and even front line workers.”

Workday also announced a new Workday Assistant to help employees find and complete HR and finance processes. Employees will be able to ask questions using natural language and receive quick, personalized answers based on their role and location. For instance, a worker wondering about changes in pay slips could ask for a summary and explanation. Or a manager approving a bonus could query about the average payout given to an employee’s peers. The new Assistant will be generally available in early 2025.

“Workday is embedding AI as well as laying out a new roadmap based on the journey of Illuminate,” said North Rizza.

Transforming UX

IDC defines three categories of digital agents, according to North Rizza: assistants that support specific tasks such as answering simple questions or summarizing meeting notes; advisors that provide insights and recommendations; and large language model (LLM)-powered agents that act autonomously and “perceive their environment, make decisions, act upon them, and interact with users or other systems in a manner like a human.”

Assistants, advisors, and agents are reducing business processing time, automating more manual and semi-manual workloads within applications and across them, and bringing more autonomous workflows into the business, North Rizza explained. This allows employees to focus on managing their portion of the business, working on client requirements, and managing customer, supplier, and partner relationships.

“For SaaS vendors, it is the quickest route to AI value embedding into applications,” she said. “In addition, working with partners to create custom items or a platform to build more are some great pathways to value for all.”

Forrester’s Naik Lopez pointed out that agents remove complexity and improve user experience (UX). Employees, for instance, don’t have to remember the specifics of a batch process report or where it lives. Instead, they can look at it from the perspective of: “’I can really use natural language with agents and that information is served up to me’,” she said. “A lot of time is saved, there’s time to value.”

 “In the future, your AI is completely going to transform the UX,” she added. “The core product will still be there, but the way we interact with them will change.”

Born in the cloud

The analysts called Workday uniquely positioned in its market and praised its strategic, deliberate approach to AI.

The company’s advantage lies in its strong customer base, enterprise-grade data, and differentiator as a cloud-native company, Naik Lopez noted. “They were born in the cloud,” she said. “They’re the SaaS poster child.”

While their models are unified, other vendors have “old school on-premises applications” and deal with the “troublesome,” time-consuming process of recreating platforms to match AI capabilities. “Workday doesn’t have that problem,” she said, adding that they are doing a “thoughtful, accountable rollout” of AI tools.

North Rizza agreed that the company is taking a “cautious approach” overall and is closely analyzing models before bringing in clients to try them out.

Advice to enterprise leaders

In choosing any AI vendor, it’s important that enterprise leaders look at data architecture, as well as value creation and adoption rates, North Rizza advised. Agents that aren’t optimized can become obsolete, or workers simply won’t use them.

“The key thing with any AI strategy is your underlying platform and data,” said Naik Lopez. “You can have amazing AI tools, but if you don’t have a good unified platform and clean, curated, unified data, they’re not going to be able to provide you with the value you need.”

She also suggested leaders keep an eye on Workday’s Extend product, which allows enterprises to create custom applications that sync with Workday apps. Customers adopting Workday ultimately have to live with the platform for 10 to 20 years, and Extend “will vouch for that longevity,” said Naik Lopez.