Workday made a series of announcements at Workday Rising around AI. It announced the addition of generative AI across its platform. It has also enhanced other AI capabilities and opened up a Workday AI Marketplace for partners to add solutions and for customers to take advantage of them. For developers within partners, it has added the Workday AI Gateway within Workday Extend, enabling them to build new applications.
Workday AI also leverages the data platform that Workday has built, meaning organisations can be confident that they are only accessing their data to power generative AI.
Carl Eschenbach, co-CEO of Workday, commented, “More than 10,000 organizations around the world rely on Workday to manage their most valuable assets – their people and their money. They trust Workday to provide powerful, responsible, transparent solutions that will propel their businesses forward.
“Today, we’re reinforcing that trust by sharing cutting-edge solutions that will completely transform the way our customers do business. With the power of AI and ML and an ecosystem of industry-leading partners, we are writing the playbook for the way the future works.”
Generative AI approach
While Workday has announced the embedding of Generative AI across its platform, it does not seem to have delivered the same holistic approach that Salesforce did a few weeks ago. One commonality, though, is the compliance approach, with Workday equally focused on delivering its generative AI solutions in a compliant and responsible manner.
Sayan Chakraborty, co-president of Workday, commented, “Generative AI has the potential to completely transform work as we know it. When applied responsibly, it has the power to elevate performance and to free up time to focus on the valuable work we really want and need to be doing.
“At Workday, we build solutions for business challenges where we can deliver clear and transformative benefits. We build enterprise-grade capabilities that are trustworthy, transparent, safe, and that keep the user in the driver’s seat at all times. Workday, our customers, and their employees are writing the playbook for how the future works together.”
Workday has added generative AI capabilities at specific points within its solution. In time, it will add more. Initial examples include:
- The ability to generate job descriptions quickly saves time for hiring managers and improves consistency across an organisation.
- Contract analysis will note discrepancies between contracts. Whether this is the start of looking at a wider contract lifecycle management solution is unknown, but it seems to encroach on their area.
- Insights around payments, including automation of reminder letters in bulk with the ability to add full statements if required.
- A new Developer Copilot within Workday Extend that will turn text into code, accelerating development times.
Workday plans to add more generative AI capabilities, including developing the user interface to let users take advantage of a conversational UI and generative AI to perform more tasks.
Jeff Gelfuso, chief design officer of Workday, said, “We recognize that generative AI is a powerful technology with the potential to have great impact on conversational experiences, and you will see us apply it in ways that generative AI is uniquely suited for.
“We are incredibly excited about the possibilities at the intersection of conversational UI and generative AI, and you can expect Workday to deliver capabilities in the future that will unlock endless possibilities for reimagining how to interact with our products.”
Most flagged features will only be rolled out in 6-12 months, by which time Workday will have also worked with customers to plan other use cases.
Other AI improvements
Workday has already rolled out over 40 ML/AI features on its platform and will continue. At Rising, it announced the addition of Manager Insights Hub, Flex Teams and Home and Insights.
The Manager Insights Hub provides personalized recommendations that can advise employees about connections, mentors, and gigs. It means that when opportunities arise within the enterprise, they can suggest ideas to employees they would not have been aware of before. Engagement with employees can help them get closer to employees and improve employee satisfaction.
Flex Teams allows managers to quickly build teams using staff from across the organisation they may not have been aware of. The manager can identify the skills needed and leverage AI within Workday Skills Cloud to identify and add suggested employees based on their skills.
David Somers, group general manager, office of the chief human resource officer product, Workday, said, “Managers play such a pivotal role in the growth and development of their teams, but face increasing pressure to improve productivity and performance while navigating evolving workplace policies.
“Workday is the single source of truth for people data, enabling us to surface relevant team information to managers when they need it most, helping them be more impactful. Workday AI is making it easier for managers to succeed in their most important role: people leadership.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
Workday has pretty much gone all in with AI. It is a wise move, with most surveys now putting AI, especially generative AI, at the top of every board’s agenda. Importantly, Workday has not gone it alone and will rely on its partners, many of whom have extensive AI practices to enhance their offerings.
Customers should keep abreast of what Workday is doing around generative AI and be aware that AI is only as good as the data it is based on. Organisations that have not yet sorted their skills ontology using the skills cloud should carefully consider what they need to do within their organisations to prepare for the AI revolution that is about to happen once Workday starts to deploy its new solutions.
