The U.S. edition of Workday Rising is taking place in Las Vegas this week. There, it is announcing Workday Illuminate, the latest version of Workday AI based on a large high-quality HR and financial dataset. Illuminate’s most important addition is the introduction of so-called AI agents.
It should be clear by now that we’ve entered the “AI agent week” of sorts. In addition to Salesforce, ServiceNow and Microsoft, Workday is now coming out with its own AI agents. Not just to relieve the ordinary employee, but especially HR people, recruiters and financial specialists.
During Workday Rising, AI will dominate. Although Techzine is not attending at the moment, we did attend a pre-briefing. In it, we were updated on the latest developments.
Illuminate merges business processes, data and context into high-performance AI model
According to Workday, the company has built the most comprehensive HR and financial data AI model on the planet. It is based on more than 800 billion business transactions processed annually on the Workday platform. That’s not all, however, as Illuminate also has access to the context of a business process. It sees why and when a process is chosen and how the process works. In addition, it takes into account how processes are connected to each other but also to people and, not unimportantly, what roles those people have. By bringing all that data and context together, Workday claims to have developed a very sophisticated AI model that underlies various AI agents.
The way people work is going to change
Perhaps by now it has become a hollow message that the way people work is going to change. After all, companies have been making this claim since the beginning of Covid-19. Back then, the reasoning behind it was having to work from home being a game-changer, now it’s AI which is set to change everything. Even though we’ve been waiting almost two years now for those changes, organizations aren’t exactly eager to bet the farm on AI yet.
Yet Workday, along with many other large tech companies, is convinced that AI is going to change everything.
AI will take over many small tasks that are also often tedious or repetitive from human workers. Summarizing and writing things like job descriptions, knowledge base articles, contracts, emails, data entry, et cetera will all be taken over by AI.
When performing complex tasks and analysis, AI can soon provide easy support, allowing an employee to reach the right analysis and conclusion much faster. You can simply ask an AI agent questions: what exactly do you want to know, and is there data available that can give an unambiguous answer?
Workday Illuminate is available immediately and will be greatly expanded in the coming years.
Workday Illuminate kicks off with five different AI agents
Workday indicates that more AI agents will follow in the future, but as of immediately, customers of the company will at least have access to five agents.
Recruiter agent
The recruiter agent will support employees in finding and hiring the best talent for open positions. This agent builds on the capabilities available within HiredScore. In addition, the AI agent helps streamline various processes. Consider finding candidates who are not responding to a position themselves, but are already working within the organization. Automatically sending messages to potential candidates, searching for top candidates based on skillsets; all of this can be automated by the agent. Furthermore, the AI agent can also create job descriptions, schedule interviews and offer insights into candidates based on public information and their resumes.
Expenses agent
Large organizations spend an average of about half a million dollars and about 3,000 hours annually correcting expense reports. With the introduction of the expenses agent, that should be a thing of the past. The AI agent is going to help employees submit their expense claims on time. Once they have paid for their breakfast at the coffee shop, they will receive an SMS telling them to photograph and upload the receipt. The expenses agent is going to compare the receipt with the credit card transaction and book it away immediately. It can also be done the other way around. When the employee checks out of the hotel and the company receives the bill by e-mail from the hotel, the expenses agent contacts the employee to verify the bill.
Succession agent
Within large organizations, one must always be concerned with training and finding future managers and leaders within the organization. It is often addressed periodically with courses, developing personal development plans and deciding who may grow into what role. The succession agent makes this an ongoing process. It helps current managers and directors identify and train future leaders within the organization. The agent can ask managers to evaluate their current team. It can also suggest who might be suitable for certain roles. Then the AI agent can help create a personal development plan.
Workday Optimize
The Workday optimize agent aims to optimize existing business processes within Workday. The goal is to find bottlenecks, inefficiencies and deviations from best practices. For example, if things are going wrong in the onboarding process, this agent can detect and in some cases fix it. The ultimate goal of this agent is to verify that the platform is being used properly, if employees drop out in a process catch it and where possible resolve it or otherwise report it.
Workday assistant
Finally, there is the Workday assistant. This solution was developed not so much for HR and finance professionals, but rather for regular employees. The assistant tries to map out all the HR and financial issues that are important to employees so that they have a place where they can always go with their questions. For example, they can ask the assistant questions about anything HR-related outside office hours. For example, questions about employee benefits, policies around leave and pregnancies, questions about their paychecks and the like.
The Workday assistant has all that information and can generate its own answer based on the available information. Such an assistant is always available, even when the HR people are not at work. Thus, it relieves those same HR people. They are less bothered with simple questions because there is an AI assistant who can answer them quickly.
However, HR people will have to make sure that all knowledge base articles and information about employment contracts and fringe benefits are neatly maintained. Otherwise, the AI agent will not always have the most recent information, which means it will not be used to its full potential.
Workday brings AI agents to Salesforce, Slack and Microsoft Teams
Workday also recognizes that organizations already have far too many applications. If you then start forcing employees to open your application to use these new AI agents, adoption will not increase quickly. That’s why Workday decided to bring AI agents to where the employee is active. For example, it has set up integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams, the most popular tools for employee collaboration. It also works with Salesforce and other enteprise solutions, among others, to allow AI agents to collaborate and exchange data.
In this way, AI tools and platforms can become even more powerful. Salesforce has also recently made its own major announcements around AI agents.
Also read: Slack takes step toward an application ecosystem around collaboration with WorkOS