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Workday opts for business-safe AI: transparent and users have full control

Insight: Cloud ERP

Workday opts for business-safe AI: transparent and users have full control

Workday has integrated AI into the centre of its platform. In this way, the company thinks it is future-proof. In 2023, investments in AI are, however, no longer a distinguishing factor for an IT company. Workday is, therefore, trying to differentiate itself further by emphasizing business-safe AI integrations. What does this mean?

“We build reliable and transparent AI tools and make sure to always give the user full control,” said Jim Stratton, CTO at Workday, in an interview with our publication. Workday already demonstrated this belief during its keynote Wednesday morning at Workday Rising EMEA. The audience was introduced to several AI tools, including the Workday AI tool that automatically generates the job description for a job posting. Receipt Scanning has a less obvious name, but also uses this technology to scan bills with a mobile camera. All tools are already currently available in more than 35 languages.

The final step of these tools is always manual verification by the user. In this way, the tool never gets the upper hand, which should make the company look more trustworthy. “We convince customers in two ways. On the one hand, by demonstrating to businesses the benefits they can get from the tools and on the other hand, by being transparent about the technology,” explains Hette Mollema, vice president of Benelux at Workday, who also made time for us in Barcelona.

AI is not obligatory

Despite the great emphasis on AI throughout the event, not all companies are convinced about the technology. Workday knows this all too well and shared some numbers about it. In the Netherlands, for example, 56 percent of leaders are open to the opportunities AI and ML have to offer their organizations. In America, only half of leaders are willing to welcome the technology. By looking at the figures the other way around it can be said at least four in 10 leaders are not yet convinced at all.

Those who count themselves to the non-believers can still use Workday’s services. But with limitations says Stratton: “Workday Talent Optimization and some other tools are completely dependent on AI and are therefore not accessible by companies that do not activate AI tools.”

There is no escape

No matter who you ask on the Workday team, companies that do not embrace AI will not survive in the long run. Mollema briefly touched on the importance for leaders to be able to explain AI and ML to staff. Sayan Chakraborty, co-president of Workday, throws it as far as a generation gap: “There is a generation of employees coming up who expect to be able to start using ChatGPT right away. We already encountered this with cell phones when a new generation expected to be allowed to use their cell phones while working. The use of AI tools in the workplace will be normalized similarly.”

Een man die voor een scherm staat met de tekst werkdag ai is er al.

Co-president Sayan Chakraborty. Source: Workday

Within the Benelux, companies opposed to AI are already unable to keep up with the trends at present, Mollema tells us. A big topic in this region appears to be the Skills Cloud, an application which cannot be used without AI. Skills Cloud lists the skills of your workforce and makes suggestions for the hiring team on important profiles that are currently missing.

Company data remains private

Another important pillar within Workday’s core values is building ethical AI. The Human Capital Management (HCM) solution provider translates this into keeping corporate data private. Not that a separate model is built out for each company to drive its AI applications. “We apply a principle of data segregation. That principle also applies to companies that do agree to share data with us for undoing improvements of the tools.”

For that matter, companies with multiple offices also always keep their data separate from other tenants. This also provides the best experience for users as it would be problematic if the Skills Cloud would state there is someone in your company with Photoshop skills, but this person turns out to be working in another country. Segregation is not extended at all levels, so it is impossible to roll out Receipt Scanning, for example, only to a few tenants.

Storage in the public cloud

Managing all this requires a robust data center. AI has a need to gobble up a lot of data space anyway, and everything from Workday is also cloud-native to ensure that all of the company’s customers are on the same version of the software. Although Workday has its own data centers in Europe and America, the company chose from the beginning to put all models for AI applications on public clouds, Stratton tells us. That decision was made several years ago, by the way. The company began developing language models in 2020 but has been working on earlier versions of AI models since 2018.

The company took on the services of Google Cloud and AWS for data storage. Google Cloud was the additional service needed to reassure retail users that their data did not end up on the cloud of competitor Amazon, of which AWS is part. Consequently, Stratton does not fear a shortage of capacity to run AI and machine learning models. Still, he does want to stress that it has never been one of Workday’s ambitions to excel on the hardware side.

The financial part

Although Workday specializes in tools for corporate finance departments, among other things, it remained remarkably quiet about the price of its AI offerings during the keynote. During a Q&A session with journalists, the question burned on everybody’s lips. Currently, there is no additional cost associated with AI tool offerings. Nor should we expect a 30 percent increase in licensing fees for the platform next year, reassures Carl Eschenbach, co-CEO of Workday.

Workday does not want to be known for such price increases that often provoke customer dissatisfaction. “We use a different pricing model than the competition that often works with a price per user. The user pays a price to use all our services,” Eschenbach says. Still, we should keep our ears open next year, as it has been repeated several times that there will be more clarity around the pricing strategy for AI tools next year.

Expanding the number of use cases with AI

Despite waiting for more clarity on exact pricing, it is not slowing down on the release of new AI tools. During the event, we were also introduced to Workday Flex, which allows managers to quickly gather a capable team for new projects. Workday Extend, in turn, is there for building enterprise applications without programming knowledge and can create an app based on a description. There appears to be greater interest in such functionality, as AWS recently released a similar tool: PartyRock. Furthermore, the audience is introduced to Manager Insights Hub. Here, managers will find the career goals of each employee and tips on how to coach the employee in achieving these goals.

The specialist in HCM solutions is thus convinced of a future in which AI will have a central place within every company. In its own platform, it has already brought this vision to life. But not everyone in the wider world believes in the technology yet; according to Workday, this is due to the often negative coverage of the technology. According to the company, the upcoming EU AI Act will be able to adjust that image. There is no doubt this will be the motivation for Workday to advise European lawmakers.

Also read: AI Act: legislation that plays catch-up with a new reality