Workday Unveils AI-Powered Productivity Boost with Workday Illuminate

Workday jumps on the AI agent train, promising to bolster employee productivity - SiliconANGLE

Workday jumps on the AI agent train, promising to bolster employee productivity Enterprise management software company Workday Inc. is following in the footsteps of its industry peers, unleashing a host of new artificial intelligence agents in its flagship platform, saying they will help users to get more work done faster. The new AI agents, unveiled at Workday's annual user conference Workday Rising today, are built on what the company says is an extremely sophisticated AI model trained on one of the most comprehensive human resources and financial datasets in the world. They were unveiled within Workday Illuminate, the latest version of the company's AI platform. The company also revealed it has made a key acquisition, buying a document intelligence startup called Evisort Inc. for an undisclosed price. Workday said its new AI agents will pave the way for users to automate workflows across recruitment, human resource management, expenses reporting, succession planning and more, while also helping to optimize various other business processes. The agents are joined by a new Workday Assistant that leverages generative AI to help workers dig up information and insights and complete simple business tasks. The company points out that its flagship, cloud-based platform encompasses one of the largest datasets in the world, encompassing more than 800 billion business transactions processed each year. In addition, Workday also has access to the context of various business processes, so it knows when and why a certain process was chosen and how it works. It also understands how various processes are connected to each other, and the roles of individuals within an organization. All of this information has helped Workday to build what it says is the most comprehensive financial and human resources-based data model on the planet. That model is what powers an array of exciting functionality in Workday Illuminate. For instance, Workday Assistant's generative AI capabilities enable it to perform everyday business tasks such as creating and summarizing job descriptions, emails, messages and more. It can also help provide insights into various complex financial and human resource-related processes, providing real-time guidance to employees as they struggle with various tasks. As for the AI agents, these are dedicated AI tools that can help to automate more specific tasks within organizations. For instance, the Recruiter Agent will help with tasks related to staff recruitment, like sourcing job candidates, initiating contact with those candidates, talent recommendations and more. It will also assist in writing job descriptions and scheduling interviews, the company said. The Expenses Agent is designed to create and submit expense reports, facilitating this process by prompting employees to submit transactions relating to their work. There's also a Succession Agent, which can help human resources teams by proactively identifying future leaders within their organization, suggesting updates to succession plans, and developing custom plans to help them nurture their most promising talents. Finally, there's an Optimize Agent that's said to help by identifying bottlenecks in business processes that can be smoothed out so as to help organizations run more efficiently. With its new AI Agents, Workday is looking to compete with rival enterprise software companies like Salesforce Inc., Microsoft Corp. and ServiceNow Inc., who have all announced agentic offerings of their own to automate work-related tasks such as marketing, workflow management, accounting, and so on. Workday's chief product officer David Somers emphasized his belief that Workday Illuminate will transform the way enterprise work gets done, empowering employees to become much more productive. It's a bold claim, all the more so considering that many organizations claim to have experienced significant problems in utilizing similar AI agents to boost their productivity. "It's the combination of data and context around that data that allows us to provide highly personalized, accurate and transformative capabilities," he explained. "That context includes things like different processes that are connected, people and roles involved, and previous conversational AI interactions." Workday is so confident that the additional context it provides will make a difference, that it is also promoting similar AI tools from its partner ecosystem. With Workday Illuminate, customers will be able to orchestrate AI agent processes created by third parties through the same platform, it said. Carl Eschenbach, chief executive at Workday, conceded that many enterprises are struggling to implement AI in a way that drives meaningful results, and tried to reassure them that his company's offerings will not lead to similar struggles. "By placing tangible business value, responsible innovation and user-centric design at the forefront, Workday Illuminate empowers businesses to harness AI's full potential to drive unprecedented productivity and move forever forward," he insisted. The AI agents promise to be a significant evolution of Workday's platform, but the company says its AI journey is still just beginning, with many more new capabilities on the way. Having just acquired Evisort, the company is planning to enhance its offerings further with a huge dose of document intelligence. San Francisco-based Evisort was founded in 2016 and has developed a number of AI modules that enable customers to analyze documents such as revenue contracts, asset agreements and supplier invoices, ostensibly to check them for errors and omissions. Of course, it can also extract various insights from those documents. For instance, the software can highlight aspects such as unclaimed benefits in supplier agreements, evaluate document language against historical benchmarks, and alert customers to upcoming dates, such as contract renewals. Evisort CEO Jerry Ting said Workday is already working hard to integrate these features into its own platforms, and that they should become available to users in the coming months. "AI is a powerful force transforming how organizations convert unstructured data in documents into strategic business decisions," he said. Workday said the acquisition is expected to close by the end of the third quarter.

Workday introduces its next generation of artificial intelligence with Illuminate

Workday's new AI-enabled services aim to help employees streamline workflows and simplify everyday tasks. Many professionals rely on enterprise management platform Workday to support operational tasks, including hiring staff, monitoring finances, dealing with payroll, and more. Now, the cloud-based platform is adding more AI-enabled services to meet its users' requirements. On Tuesday, Workday introduced Illuminate, its newest AI-enabled technology that uses AI models based on the company's HR and financial data. These models understand the context behind the data and are integrated into the platform to help employees save time by streamlining workflows and simplifying everyday tasks. Also: Slack's new AI-powered assistant aims to streamline your busy workweek For example, Workday says Illuminate users can leverage generative AI to assist with everyday tasks, such as creating and summarizing job descriptions, messages, contracts, and more. Illuminate also offers users insights in key areas, like anomaly detection, and automation tools, such as auto-filling. A new Workday Assistant, powered by Illuminate, helps users understand how to deal with complicated HR and finance processes, giving real-time guidance on completing their tasks. Lastly, Illuminate includes new agents or AI assistants that employees can use to perform tasks. The new agents include Recruiter Agent, Expenses Agent, Succession Agent, and Workday Optimize. Also: Microsoft Copilot's Wave 2 is here. Everything you need to know The Recruiter Agent helps users automate recruitment tasks, such as sourcing candidates, reaching out to candidates, and recommending top talent. The agent also helps with administrative-related recruiting tasks, including creating job descriptions and scheduling interviews. The Expenses Agent automatically creates and submits expense reports, facilitating the process by prompting the employee to submit a transaction or automatically creating itemizations and expense lines. Also: What are o1 and o1-mini? OpenAI's mystery AI models are finally here The Succession Agent assists managers by proactively identifying future leaders, prompting managers to update succession plans, and helping to develop tailored plans for top talent. Lastly, the Workday Optimize agent identifies "bottlenecks" in business processes that can be addressed and fixes issues so everything runs smoothly. Workday also works with partners like Salesforce to build integrated agent capabilities. Also: IBM will train you in AI fundamentals for free, and give you a skill credential - in 10 hours Recently, there has been a wave of AI agents in enterprise offerings. Microsoft unveiled its Copilot agents yesterday, following the launch of Salesforce's Agentforce, a suite of autonomous and collaborative AI agents. Workday's Illuminate is already available to customers, but Workday said it will continue to evolve the technology as part of its three-year AI roadmap. The Recruiter Agent is now available in the talent orchestration platform HiredScore, with more integration in Workday coming in Spring 2025. The Expenses, Succession, and Optimize Agents are expected to become available in early access in 2025.

Workday Rising 24 - AI takes center stage with Workday Illuminate

Today's Workday Rising conference opens with the unveiling of Workday Illuminate, billed as the next generation of the cloud HCM and finance vendor's AI offerings. It brings new AI agents to automate workflows in recruitment, expense reporting and succession planning, as well as optimizing business processes, while a new Workday Assistant leverages AI to help users find information and complete tasks. The vendor believes the combined impact will be huge. David Somers, Chief Product Officer at Workday, says: We believe Workday Illuminate will completely change how work gets done by empowering people to achieve more. It's a big claim, and one that the vendor acknowledges comes against a backdrop of enterprises facing difficulties in successfully harnessing AI. Workday believes that its platform provides the necessary foundations to deliver meaningful outcomes. Somers explains: It's the combination of data and context around that data that allows us to provide highly personalized, accurate and transformative capabilities. That context includes things like different processes that are connected, people and roles involved, and previous conversational AI interactions. These capabilities are most evident from the new agents being unveiled today, described as "the first of many" that are in the pipeline: The new Workday Assistant sits in the Workday application -- or within Microsoft 365 Copilot, Teams or Slack -- ready to help users find information or complete actions. Employees can ask questions using natural language and the AI-powered search function will respond with personalized answers based on the context of their role, location, and needs. For example, an employee who is puzzled by changes to their pay slip would receive a breakdown of the changes and an explanation of why they had come about. Previously, this would likely have generated a help desk ticket and have taken some time and maybe a bit of back-and-forth before the employee got the answer they needed. The assistant can also guide employees through complex tasks, based on contextual information. For example, a manager looking to give an employee a one-time bonus could receive detailed information such as the allowable range, company policy, and average bonus amounts awarded to peers in the organization. The emphasis throughout is on augmentation of what employees are doing, rather than automating their roles out of existence. Somers explains: One of the key call-outs on this, I would say, is, if you think about the recruiting process in general, there's three personas involved with that. There's the candidate, there's the hiring manager, there's the talent acquisition professional. A lot of what gets lost, or what makes those processes difficult, is literally the co-ordination of those three personas and what they're doing within that process. They each have their own process that they're following, and that, in the case of a hiring manager, they typically don't know what the process even is! They've maybe been with the company a year or two. They maybe hire a couple people a year. The ability for the AI to really, at the end of the day, affect the process, make that process faster, is a lot of the value that we see, from orchestrating and leveraging agents. It is not to replace a human in making a decision in terms of, 'Hey, does a person who says they have something like leadership capabilities?', you're still going to have to assess that. They're still going to have to go through an interview panel. That's not going to go away. All of the AI capabilities announced today are expected to be added into existing products at no additional charge. Somers says: The plan is to put out these capabilities in the products that our customers own. So if you own the product -- as an example, take Expenses Agent -- if you own expenses, you will get that capability with that particular product. You can see why Carl Eschenbach, Workday's CEO, was talking about a "game-changing" week -- if Workday Illuminate lives up to its promise, this will have a big impact. We'll be assessing the details and getting customer reactions in our Rising coverage through the rest of the week.