AI agents are starting to get to work. Always keen to make our working lives better-managed and easier to exist in, workplace, operations and financials platform technology company Workday has now come forward with the Workday Agent System of Record. This is not an AI agent system, this is a system of record software package designed to govern, optimise and track AI agents.
Given that agentic AI functions are now becoming part of the operational fabric of digitally aligned businesses – and the fact that so-called “systems of record” still make up the core fabric of all Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) deployments, despite the fact that the ERP industry would like to call its systems or record offerings a system of action in many cases to make them sound more business-focused and dynamic – Workday says its software can help manage entire fleets of AI agents, whether those agentic functions stem from Workday, or third-party providers.
Digital labour is here
“The workforce of the future will include both humans and AI agents, and businesses that don’t learn to manage this incredibly complex reality will fall quickly behind,” said Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and executive chair, Workday. “Our deep understanding of human skills and roles naturally extends to managing digital labour. The future is here, and just like with the transition to the cloud, we’re ready to help our customers get there first.”
Bhusri and team suggest that without proper tracking of the new digital labour force, enterprises risk fragmented systems, security challenges and lack of oversight. He says that Workday is stepping in to provide a trusted, centralised way to manage digital and human workforces together.
Key features include centralised AI agent management so that users get one system to manage all AI agents across HR, finance and operations for transparency into their impact and effectiveness.
An AI agent marketplace enables Workday and partner AI agents to be discovered (and indeed deployed via Workday Marketplace), alongside new role-based AI agents which also exist for payroll, contracts, financial auditing and policy enforcement. As one would hope, there is a defined focus on security & compliance to ensure any AI agents deployed adhere to governance, security and ethical AI standards.
Human performance amplified… one louder
“At Workday, we believe that humans and agents should peacefully coexist in a way that amplifies human performance,” said Carl Eschenbach, CEO, Workday. “As the system of record for more than 10,500 organisations around the world, there is no one better than Workday to manage every part of the workforce – employees, contingent workers and agents – on our trusted platform.”
Eschenbach talks about the shaping (digitally speaking) of AUI agents into the workforce so that they can be onboarded securely and in a way where teams can define their roles and responsibilities, track their impact, budget and forecast their costs, support compliance and foster improvement.
Touchy-feely HR functions
Workday’s role-based agents contain a configurable set of ‘skills’ that give them more autonomy and the ability to more fully support people in their roles. The agents can perform hundreds of individual tasks.
Alongside the payroll, contracts, auditing and policy agents already mentioned above, Workday’s previously announced role-based agents include software bots designed to handle recruiting and the slightly HR touchy-feely HR and human capital management (HCM)-related disciplines of talent mobility (enabling employees within a company to move to different roles, departments, or locations within a business), succession (identifying future leadership role candidates) and wider worker optimisation.
VP of data and AI at AWS Swami Sivasubramanian is a fan. He says that with Workday’s Agent System of Record, organisations will be much better positioned to ethically manage all their agents. AWS is partnering (sorry, AWS is “excited to collaborate” no less) with Workday on these projects to help reshape the future of work through agentic AI.
Sivasubramanian underlines his statement by reminding us that AWS is powering the future of AI agent development through Amazon Bedrock’s foundation model ecosystem and enterprise-grade development framework.
“Digital colleagues, or AI agents, will become an increasingly common addition to the workforce and Workday’s Agent System of Record is well positioned to help organisations meet the moment of monumental change,” said Steve Chase, vice chair of AI and digital innovation, KPMG LLP. “We’re thrilled to collaborate with Workday to help our shared clients manage the new digital workforce with confidence just as they do full-time employees and contractors.”
Workday Illuminate
Workday’s news offerings are powered by its Workday Illuminate brand, a high-level wide-ranging technology that offers platform-level controls – and these admittedly are words we’ve heard elsewhere, but in this case that holistic view will be important because we’re talking about centrally managed technologies that require widespread enterprise adoption is they are to be successfully deployed and used. Trust in the agentic AI workforce may still be some way off, but this formalisation and standardisation of controls is surely a helpful step in the right direction.