Companies can get started with Workday’s AI agents. They get some time to experiment with the possibilities, during which Workday seems to take a break from innovating its product suite. Workday provides the tools, but it is up to the companies themselves to take the lead.
Businesses live in a world that is constantly changing. Even before one crisis is resolved, the next has begun. Even before the company can keep up with a hype, it has blown over. As Carl Eschenbach, CEO of Workday, puts it, “The only thing constant in today’s changing world, which is disrupted by AI and geopolitical situations, among other things, is change.'” Companies have to embrace it because “if the world outside your company is changing faster, you’re losing.”
Workday has earlier jumped on the bandwagon of AI. The development actually began within company walls more than a decade ago, but since last year the company has started to emphasize this in every event. Not that we can blame them, as Eschenbach puts it, since 2023, you are no longer a name if AI is not a prominent part of your offering.
Adding value to AI
This year, Workday took the story a step further. It did so a few months ago with the announcement of Illuminate. The company’s AI Agent “illuminated” or clarified the company’s AI vision. It brought clarity to what AI can do for the Workday platform and its users. Each Agent introduced can support a particular task and team in action. An example is the recruiter agent who supports employees in filling a job opening with the best talent.
Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach
During the European Workday tour, which is taking place in Amsterdam this year, Eschenbach is already demonstrating the added value that the recruiter-agent brings. “With recruiter-agent, a vacancy is filled 35 percent faster.” He cites this finding to give the companies what they ask for. In fact, according to the CEO, companies want to know the added value they get from implementing AI, while they do not get these insights from other providers of AI tools. “Many individuals are working with AI, but they get frustrated because they can’t see the ROI,” he said.
At Workday, they drop the percentages to clearly show the ROI. The origin of these results is unknown. Especially for this tool that only launched in September, we think a healthy dose of misgiving is in order here.
Demanding change but not leading it
Moreover, the numbers are a nice camouflage to hide the meager content of the entire event. The hunger for change that Eschenbach so insisted on remains after the European edition of Workday Rising. Only one update to a smaller tool is announced this week. On stage, this is further met by repeating last year’s message. That one tells, on the one hand, that the company’s AI can be fully trusted because the data remains in the internal systems. On the other hand, they very proudly repeat they got the chance to give advice on the AI Act to the relevant European bodies.
The new announcement ties Illuminate to Workday Peakon Employee Voice. This tool processes employee feedback on the organization’s actions. Instead of going through each report individually, GenAI summarizes the content with indications of key themes. Managers can retrieve the summary for the entire company as well as for specific locations or teams.
Taking charge
Companies don’t have to sit passively waiting for Workday’s innovations. Through Extend, they can actively put themselves in the driver’s seat and build apps that fit personal needs. A fairly modest 1,000 companies working with the Workday platform are said to have already taken advantage of it. There is a large scope for the company to expand this group, and they tap into this opportunity during the Amsterdam edition. ‘Extend’ is emerging as the second buzzword alongside AI. Moreover, the two complement each other with Workday Extend Developer Copilot. Users describe what they have in mind or what purpose an app should serve, and AI converts the words into app code.
In addition to Extend adoption, Workday is trying to drive the Illuminate adoption. It must be clear to the more than 2,100 European companies that use Workday why Illuminate is better than, say, a ChatGPT. On the one hand, the privacy aspect is important in that, because ChatGPT is using the given data to train its LLM. On the other hand, there is a better quality of output due to the specific focus on financial processes in the training set. “With a billion transactions a year, the dataset we have to make AI work for you is huge.” Good reasons, but they may not be enough, as people like to choose the easy option. That is why Workday is bringing the tools to the places people are. The earlier announced partnership with Salesforce is a great example of this approach.
The Workday platform is built through collaboration between Workday, its customers, and its partners. For now, the company seems to be taking a step back from this group project. After being enlightened by Illuminate, AI seems to have blindsided the company. Innovation is being left to customers and partners. As the AI agents take work off their hands, they end up getting time for it during their work hours. Personalization of Workday offerings can certainly yield significant benefits to improve work processes or better align AI with business needs.
Read more: Workday introduces Illuminate; new generation of AI with agents