Workday Launches AI Agent Management System, Blurring Lines Between HR and IT

Workday launches a 'system of record' for AI agents - is this HR or IT?

Are AI agents part of the workforce or are they just another IT asset? This week, Workday, not previously known as an IT service management vendor, weighed into the 'digital labor' debate with the launch of the Workday Agent System of Record. This is billed as a tool that helps organizations "manage their entire fleet of AI agents in one place." Does this mean AI agents now come under HR? Workday seems to think so, saying that it "is stepping in to provide a trusted, centralized way to manage digital and human workforces together." Workday also launched a further four role-based agents to add to the initial four unveiled at last year's Rising conference. These sit firmly in Workday's traditional domains of HR and Finance, and comprise a contracts agent that monitors contracts, a payroll agent that carries out various payroll actions, a financial auditing agent for enterprises and their audit firms, and a policy agent that keeps employees and managers up-to-date on a company's corporate policies. But the main focus was on the Agent System of Record, which Workday sees enterprises using to manage not only its own agents but also those of other vendors across their entire lifecycle. Its functions include processes for defining the roles and responsibilities of new agents as they are onboarded, controls to turn them on and off, monitoring and analytics to track their impact and optimize the cost of developing, deploying and maintaining them, governance procedures to support data privacy, bias, access control and other compliance factors, and feedback to foster continuous improvement. While it's obvious that agents will need managing, Workday isn't the most obvious choice of vendor to provide that capability. As part of the IT estate, it might seem more natural to look to established IT service management vendors such as ServiceNow, which launched its own agent strategy last month; or integration vendors such as Boomi, which is developing its own agent registry for release in the spring; or some of the up-and-coming pureplay AI governance players such as Holistic AI or Credo AI. But Workday argues that, since AI agents will be taking on responsibilities that have previously been the preserve of human workers, there are common processes where it does have experience, such as onboarding, training, compliance, security, access controls, and other aspects of workforce management. AI agents may not be human, but as they take on roles that interact with customers, partners or employees and their data, this 'digital workforce' will have to adhere to the same ethical standards, company values, codes of conduct, compliance rules and performance expectations as their human co-workers. As David Somers, Workday's Chief Product Officer, explains in a Workday blog post accompanying this week's announcement: Accuracy, consistency, bias, speed, and cost are all things we need to consider carefully when implementing agentic AI within organizations. That's why it's so important to set clear boundaries and rules for how they operate. Just like we wouldn't give a new employee free rein over sensitive systems, we need to control what our AI agents can access and do. Many companies today lack a central way to do this, which is a big risk. That's where an agent system of record comes in. This acts as a central AI system of record for governance, management, auditing, monitoring, and role-based access controls, ensuring AI agents are used responsibly and efficiently. He also notes that Workday's Skills Cloud already has a detailed mapping of the skills that make up each of the roles employees perform throughout an enterprise, which has helped inform the creation of agents to perform certain aspects of those roles. He writes: These role-based agents may start with a skill and they will, over time, have many configurable skills. Role-based agents are more valuable than task-based agents because they mirror the multifaceted nature of actual roles, going beyond simple task completion. He concludes: [D]igital workers are now joining human workers as one combined workforce, and we need a unified platform to manage them as one. This is a fundamental shift, and companies that don't embrace managing this complexity will fall behind. Workday is uniquely positioned to lead this transition. We understand human capital management, skills, and roles better than anyone; managing digital labor is a natural extension. I really don't buy this argument. Yes, AI agents need careful management and governance. But that's a job for IT, not HR. No one ever argued that bank CHROs should have ATMs under their wing, or that Chief People Officers in the retail industry should have ultimate responsibility for the security and operation of self-service checkouts. Why does AI, simply because it's a novel digital technology that people often anthropomorphize, suddenly need to be treated differently than any other machine that takes away people's jobs? So what possessed Workday to get into the IT service management field with its Agent System of Record? Here's why this move makes sense for Workday: All of this makes far better sense than arguing that AI agents should be treated as another segment of the enterprise workforce alongside permanent employees and contingent workers -- that AI should be employed, not deployed. What Workday has built is actually an IT service management tool and should be under the control of the IT function. At the same time, the IT and HR teams need to collaborate closely to ensure that the controls and guardrails that originate from the people management domain are correctly applied when managing digital agents. But HR's primary focus remains keeping an organization's people happy and ensuring they function at maximum effectiveness -- they'll have plenty to do on that score, which we'll come to in a moment -- rather than getting distracted by attempting to manage something that is outside of their domain expertise. One other aspect of the HR domain where the introduction of agents will have an important impact is in workforce planning. As Somers signals in his comments noted above, the Workday Skills Cloud has prepared the ground here by creating a map of skills and roles across an enterprise that could help HR leaders identify which jobs are most likely to be impacted by the introduction of role-based agents. Julie Sweet, CEO of Skills Cloud user Accenture, spoke at Davos about this process at her own company: I have a database of almost 800,000 people and their skills. We're systematically re-defining the skills needed at Accenture - who needs gen AI, what kinds of technology? - but also, as we are replacing some of the things that they're doing with gen AI, we're able to identify who could be upskilled. Some observers noted the irony of this week's announcement from Workday celebrating the growth of digital labor, after last week's news that Workday is laying off 1,750 employees, amounting to 8.5% of its workforce, in a move linked to AI investments. But Carl Eschenbach, Workday's CEO, told Fortune this week that there was no link between the two announcements, saying: This is a restructuring of our company to make sure we're aligning our workforce at Workday around the biggest opportunities... It's about restructuring to get more dollars to spend on innovation and meet the customer demand. Nevertheless, it seems clear that widespread deployment of agents will cause many employees at Workday and elsewhere to reconsider their career plans. Some may themselves find it useful to consult the Workday Skills Cloud platform, which the vendor only recently revealed it is beefing up for its own employees in collaboration with TechWolf, an AI-powered skills intelligence tool. The wider picture is that workforces are going to experience a lot more turbulence and HR teams will have their work cut out just managing all of that, without having to add responsibility for the growing population of AI agents at the same time. The other takeaway here is that agents are coming and CIOs face the novel challenge of managing them. There will be no shortage of vendors offering to help with that task -- Workday is one among many that sees an opportunity to either expand its footprint or defend its turf, depending on your point of view. It is not only people's jobs that are going to be reconfigured or replaced by the advent of agent technology. Enterprise technology vendors face a challenging time too and are already jockeying for position in this new world.

Workday unveils AI agent workforce management system - SiliconANGLE

Enterprise management software company Workday Inc. today unveiled a workforce management system designed to help companies track, govern and optimize their growing artificial intelligence agent lineups. Workday is calling the new platform the Agent System of Record. It's aimed at helping businesses that are onboarding agents keep track of their new digital workforce and treat them the same way they do any other piece of software, while addressing new challenges that come with AI agents. "The workforce is expanding," said Workday Chief Executive Carl Eschenbach. "It's no longer just human workers; it's also digital workers." Eschenbach said the System of Record will provide businesses with an efficient way to onboard new AI Agents, define roles and responsibilities, track impact, budget and forecast costs and analyze compliance, all from a centralized dashboard that creates a single point of truth. The trend toward agentic AI has already begun to have an impact on the enterprise by providing capable AI agents that can act with minimal or no human intervention. Role-based agents with skill sets similar to human workers can access large amounts of company data and use software tools to augment human workers by automating knowledge work and writing tasks. However, similar to how software-as-a-service and rogue cloud software have caused the spread of software and services to creep into information technology and the looming issues of shadow IT, AI agent sprawl could cause just as many headaches. The new system builds on Workday Illuminate, the latest version of the company's AI platform, which brought generative AI agents to automate business workflows for customers such as recruitment, human resource management, expense reporting, succession planning and more. At the heart of the Agent System of Record Workday said there would be an agent registration system that would provide organizations a roster of what agents are currently available. It includes role-based access for agents, their capabilities and the ability to activate and deactivate them. That will provide companies with an overseer role using the same role-based security capacity that's used for employees with AI agents as well. Employees and users will access Workday agents through the Workday Assistant, which will act to manage and orchestrate the appropriate AI agent according to what an employee needs at the time. The assistant is an AI chatbot-like interface that will answer questions and invoke agents using natural language. When a user needs a particular agent to activate, the Assistant will trigger it behind the scenes without users needing to figure it out themselves. They only need to ask a question or make a request. "Our goal is to provide a simple and consistent conversational user experience as that primary user interface for all agents across Workday," said Workday Chief Product Officer David Somers, "taking the burden off the user to figure out, 'Where should I go to get an answer from a particular agent?'" This same experience can be mapped across applications such as chat interfaces embedded in productivity apps or into Slack as well, Somers added. Workday also announced the release of several new role-based AI agents that now will be included in the company's agent Marketplace in addition to the company's previously released agents. They include a Contracts Agent, a Payroll Agent, a Financial Auditing Agent and a Policy Agent. Although most agents in the marketplace are task-based and follow step-by-step instructions, role-based agents are configurable based on a set of "skills" and designed to act on a broader autonomy within their roles. Thanks to this configuration, Workday says, they can be extended and tailored by the customer to better fit their particular industry or individual needs.

Workday launches a platform for enterprises to manage all of their AI agents in one place | TechCrunch

HR giant Workday is launching a new way for enterprises to keep track of all of their AI agents in one place. It's also launching a few more AI agents of its own, for good measure. Silicon Valley-based Workday announced on Tuesday the release of Workday Digital Workforce Management, which is meant to help customers keep track of their AI agents in one control center, regardless of whether the agent is managed by Workday or by a third party. This system gives companies visibility into what all of their agents are supposed to be doing, which tasks they are actually completing, and who at the company has access to which agents. The software tracks the impact of each AI agent and projected costs. Companies can also use the platform to turn agents on and off entirely or turn certain skills or tasks on or off. Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach said on a press briefing that as AI agents become an increasing part of an enterprise company's workflow, companies should have a way to manage them just like people. "The workforce is expanding," Eschenbach said. "It's no longer just human workers, it's now digital workers, and we need to have a unified platform that manages your entire workforce going forward." Eschenbach added that while AI will be one of the biggest technological breakthroughs of our lifetime, enterprises are still nervous to adopt the tech. He said that they are worried they could lose control of the agents at their company or that agents could get access to data they aren't supposed to have. Workday hopes this product can mitigate the stress. Workday also announced a fleet of its own new AI agents that are focused on areas including payroll, contracts, and financial auditing, among others. The company previously released four agents in September that targeted areas including recruitment and talent mobility. Workday's new agents are meant to be more role-driven than task-driven like many other AI agents. David Somers, Workday's chief product officer, said that having these agents more focused on a role, compared to a task, means they have specific knowledge and expertise and will be able to better collaborate with human employees. "A lot of people talk about agents, but these agents today are doing a task. They're just doing something that is repetitive and making it faster," Eschenbach added. "The true power of agents is when they become role based, and these role-based agents will maybe start out with a skill, but they will, over time, have many skills, and this is how we will truly unlock the power of AI." Workday won't charge enterprises for use of the AI agent managing platform but will charge for use of Workday AI agents, as it has in the past. This announcement comes a week after Workday laid off 1,750 employees, about 8.5% of its headcount, with Eschenbach stating at the time that the world had changed and the company needs a new approach, which included looking to hire more AI talent.

Workday Unveils Tool for Managing AI Agent Fleets | PYMNTS.com

Workday has launched a tool to help companies manage their artificial intelligence (AI) agents. Workday Agent System of Record, announced by the enterprise software firm Tuesday (Feb. 11), lets organizations oversee a fleet of AI agents from one place. "As the number and complexity of AI agents grow, organizations of all sizes face a new set of challenges: managing their deployment, ensuring their security and compliance, optimizing their impact, and managing costs," the company said in a news release. "Without a centralized approach, they risk fragmented operations, increased security risk, and difficulty measuring the true value of their AI investments." The Workday system, the release added, offers an easier way to onboard new AI agents, establish their roles and responsibilities, monitor their impact, budget and forecast their costs, and support compliance. Aneel Bhusri, Workday's co-founder and executive chair, said the product is designed for a future in which companies employ both human workers and AI agents, meaning businesses need to know how to manage this reality or fall behind. "We believe no company in the world is better positioned than Workday to usher in this new era of workforce management in a trusted, ethical way," Bhusri said. "Our deep understanding of human skills and roles naturally extends to managing digital labor. The future is here, and just like with the transition to the cloud, we're ready to help our customers get there first." PYMNTS examined the rise of AI agents in a Tuesday report focusing on their use in software engineering. Experts, that report say, argue that while AI will continue to improve, there's still more to the success of a software engineer than skill at coding. "Simply coding is not the primary value of a software engineer," Jim Olsen, CTO of ModelOp, told PYMNTS. "Actually figuring out what the desired solution and outcome is, and the nuances of design for providing a flexible solution that will stand the test of time" are skills AI cannot replicate. Software engineers working in AI require a blend of expertise in software development, programming, data science and data engineering, Olsen said. And though AI can potentially replace low-level engineers, the problem then becomes who to train for mid- to senior-level engineering positions that will still be required, he added. Ilya Smirnov, head of the AI/ML department at Usetech, held a similar opinion. "AI will not replace software developers anytime soon. Even with customization, specific use cases and wishful thinking, AI has too many limitations. Nevertheless, AI will change the way software engineers work."