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Artificial intelligence is no longer just a tool - it’s your own business process expert.
This was the central message of Workday’s recent Illuminate Work AI event in London - the latest Workday event at which industry leaders, including eduMe, TechWolf and Paradox AI, gathered to explore how AI is fundamentally reshaping HR, finance, and enterprise operations.
As Workday continues to position itself at the forefront of AI innovation, the company unveiled its ‘AI Agent System of Record’, and with it, a bold vision for the future of work.
Of what is this future comprised?
In it, AI is not just a conversational partner or assistive chatbot, but a dynamic entity that needs to be onboarded, managed and governed.
From assistants to agents: Workday’s vision for AI
Over the last 6 months, Workday has gradually laid out its vision for the future of AI in enterprise operations. At Workday Rising in the U.S. CEO Karl Eschenbach previewed Workday’s AI suite (‘Workday Illuminate’), along three tracks: ‘Accelerate’, ‘Assist’ and ‘Transform’.
‘Accelerate’ is the AI the general public are by now most familiar with - the version of AI offered by ChatGPT and Gemini, which assists users in research, content creation, summarization and similar.
‘Assist,’ or the chatbot variant, is integrated AI with company datasets at its fingertips, supporting users in retrieving company-specific knowledge (or data) so decision makers can move forward quickly and confidently.
What audiences may be less acclimatized to - and the focus of both Illuminate Work and recent digital showcase - is a new frontier and “Nirvana” dubbed by Workday as ‘Transform’.
‘Transform’ ushers in autonomous AI that can manage multi-stakeholder processes end-to-end. In this new era, AI “is not just about automating simple tasks” Katie Holden, VP of Software Development at Workday explained. Now, “AI can understand complex requests, reason about the best approach, and take action on behalf of users”.
The long-term vision? AI-as-a-team-member. According to Co-Founder & Executive Chair Aneel Bhusri, ‘Transform’ will provide Workday users with “digital employees” , your “very own team of business process experts” that understand your goals, create plans to achieve them, and collaborate with you to an outcome.
This shift from AI-powered assistance to autonomously functioning agents was a recurring theme at Illuminate Work. ‘Agentic AI’ as it’s more broadly known formed the foundation of the discussions of several of the day’s panels.
This included the talks AI Innovation to Reality: Bridging the Gap in the World of Work and How to Adopt AI: Taking a Strategic Approach to AI Use Case Prioritisation, featuring commentary from key Workday partners, including eduMe’s CTO Mikko Heikela, who shared that though today eduMe is "leveraging generative AI to help customers seamlessly transfer existing knowledge - like classroom training or documentation - onto our platform" tomorrow, as they "evolve toward advanced content curation and improvement, "managing AI agent access securely is crucial", adding "it’s exciting to see how Workday is positioning their Agent System of Record to solve this.”
The ‘Agent System of Record’: a new standard for AI governance?
Workday’s back-to-back AI-related announcements signify a tectonic shift in the space - from AI as a casually incorporated task time-saver, to an intelligent, embedded executor that will be indispensable to the corporation of the future. Josh Bersin, a primary voice in the HR space described the change as “a shift from AI ‘dazzlers’ to AI ‘capabilities’ within the entire Workday platform”.
But, as companies begin to more deeply integrate capable AI into their workflows, a pressing question emerges - how do businesses manage an expanding network of AI agents without losing control? For Workday customers, with their ‘Agent System of Record’.
Workday’s Agent System of Record can be relied on as “a centralized command center” that allows businesses to govern, manage, audit and monitor AI, ensuring “agents are used responsibly and efficiently”, CPO David Somers shared.
This structured approach is Workday’s answer to the potential ‘wild west’ of unchecked AI adoption. Workday’s Skills Cloud will define what an AI agent can do, mirroring how human employees are categorized by skills and roles. And like human employees, AI agents will have identities, security privileges, and governance policies, to ensure controlled access and cooperation with enterprise compliance standards.
CEO of AI-powered legal tool Harvey, highlighted Workday’s unique standing as “the largest system of record”, which puts them in prime position position to securely regulate AI access to enterprise data, so that agents - for instance - would never be " accessing documents the human using that agent" couldn't.
Workday Illuminate: ability today, potential tomorrow
So if this is a vision of the future, where are we today?
Workday report successful agent deployments across their HR and Finance products, with 700,000 job requisitions processed by their Recruiting agent, and with their Talent Mobility, Payroll and Policy agents all automating various tasks, including matching employees to career opportunities and flagging compliance anomalies before they escalate to risks.
Workday & the partner ecosystem
Beyond Workday’s own AI agents, the company intend to grow an Agentic AI ecosystem where third-party software provider partners, and even customers, are encouraged to build - and ultimately integrate - their own AI-driven solutions into Workday’s infrastructure.
The ‘Agent Gateway’ will allow external AI agents to communicate with Workday’s natively built AI, facilitating agent-to-agent communications across software. To facilitate this, Workday will open the door for their partners to extend, modify, and build AI agents to work alongside Workday’s own offerings, which is when “the magic starts to happen”, says Somers.
We see a not too distant future where all of our customers will have lots of agents. Not just agents built by Workday… They’ll have agents that they build as well… Then of course we’ll have partner agents. There’ll be a proliferation of agents - Somers
Interoperability was a key theme at Illuminate AI, where Paradox AI shared the stage with eduMe in a panel discussion about the role of AI in workforce management. As a specialized AI that helps recruiters automate repetitive tasks around scheduling, qualification and onboarding so that they can focus on high-value candidate interactions, Paradox is one of many Workday-integrated solutions demonstrating how AI can augment human capabilities.
The road ahead
Illuminate London was just the latest Workday event geared around showcasing a future where AI is not just a tool, but a business partner and active participant in business operations.
As AI agents become more capable, businesses will need to strike a balance between innovation and governance, ensuring AI enhances human decision-making, for “a future where AI and humans work together to achieve greater outcomes”.
With Workday Illuminate leading the charge, and Workday-integrated software partners like eduMe, Paradox and TechWolf each with their own ambitious AI roadmaps, it’s clear that the next era of AI business transformation-focused, and era that will be assisted by communication between a cohort of AI-led softwares.
