Workday Unveils New AI Developer Toolset to Streamline Agent Management and App Development

Workday unveils new AI tools and agents for developers - here's how to access

The software company is repositioning itself as 'the AI platform for managing people, money, and agents.' Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly central to the app-building process. At the same time, developers are awash in a rising wave of new AI tools, including agents. Now, Workday wants to help keep their heads above water. The company unveiled a suite of new AI features at its annual developer conference, Workday DevCon 2025, which kicked off on Monday. The announcements centered on a new developer toolset designed to help customers manage their ever-growing roster of AI tools within Workday. Also: NiCE launches new branding as it shifts from CCaaS to CX-focused AI platform The toolset includes "Agent Gateway," a feature that allows developers to integrate third-party AI agents into Workday's new Agent System of Record (ASOR). Think of it as a platform for assigning tasks to and overseeing the collaboration between a team of virtual employees. Customers can also now list and sell their custom agents on Workday Marketplace, the company's online app store. Workday has also announced that developers can now add AI-powered widgets to their apps, making it easier for their users to access automated assistance. (A chatbot widget, for example, might be added to field customer service queries.) The third and final feature included in the developer toolset is an expansion of Workday's APIs. Customers are now able to integrate new Workday AI features directly into their apps. As a result, their users can ask finance- or HR-related questions through the apps, in natural language, and receive AI-generated responses. Also: Snowflake's new AI agents make it easier for businesses to make sense of their data The new toolset is intended to make Workday a kind of one-stop shop for the oversight of developers' agents and other AI tools. "Today, developers are under immense pressure to rapidly deliver sophisticated AI apps while navigating a complex and fragmented AI landscape," Matthew Grippo, Workday's SVP of core software, said in a statement. "Workday's new AI developer toolset removes these barriers by empowering developers to seamlessly integrate powerful AI capabilities into the apps and agents that will define the future of work." Workday also introduced its Developer Copilot, an AI assistant designed to simplify and streamline the app-building process. The tool can increase developer productivity by as much as 50%, according to the company. Developers can, for example, ask the chatbot in natural language to generate bits of code that can then be inserted into apps. They can also ask for recommendations for particular APIs. According to the press release, Workday's announcements today mark the company's latest effort to reposition itself from a financial and HR management software company to "the AI platform for managing people, money, and agents. " Also: Snowflake launches Openflow to help businesses manage data in the age of AI The new AI features are built on top of Workday Illuminate, the company's AI platform introduced in September. According to the company, Illuminate is fed more than one trillion HR and financial transactions each year, providing it with a "deep contextual understanding of how work gets done." All of the new features will be generally available by the end of this year, according to the company, with the exception of Agent Gateway, which will initially only be available for a cohort of select customers.

Workday's new dev tools help enterprises connect with external agents

Among the additions are some improvements to Workday's Developer Copilot, which can now generate application code snippets, data queries, and functional orchestrations. Workday has presented new developer tools to help enterprises connect its HR and finance software with external agents. The tools are an extension of the company's Illuminate agentic AI platform, and include the Agent Gateway, AI Widgets, and expanded AI Gateway APIs. Illuminate, rolled out in September 2024, is intended to accelerate common tasks such as writing knowledge-based text, job descriptions, or contracts, providing real-time AI assistance within workflows, and making a "team" of AI experts available to users. The models behind it are powered by the 800 billion business, HR, and financial transactions made by Workday customers annually.

Workday launches AI agent developer toolset with third-party connector and custom widgets - SiliconANGLE

Workday launches AI agent developer toolset with third-party connector and custom widgets Enterprise management software company Workday Inc. today unveiled a new unified developer toolset for building artificial intelligence apps and agents on its platform. Announced during the company's annual developer conference Workday DevCon 2025 in Las Vegas, the new toolset includes an Agent Gateway that will provide connectors for third-party AI agents and for agent-to-agent collaboration, AI widgets and expanded application programming interfaces for native integration into AI apps. With the new AI Agent Gateway developers will be able to connect third-party agents to the Workday Agent System of Record, a platform the company launched in February aimed at helping businesses onboard agents and treat them like any new piece of software. At the time the company said businesses were facing an unprecedented influx of AI agents from all corners that were serving to solve numerous use cases, but didn't have a good way to manage them. Grippo told SiliconANGLE in an interview that the company sees AI agents, which are specialized autonomous pieces of AI software capable of taking action with little or no human oversight, as onboarding similar to employees. The purpose of the Workday Agent System of Record is to allow businesses to have a platform that can bring on agents that will provide them with a framework where they can use AI agents alongside human teams. "Businesses now have a way for teams to collaborate with AI agents with built-in trust," Grippo said. Partners will also be able to enroll in a new Agent Partner Network and list agents on the Workday Marketplace. Customers will be able to select agents for their specific needs and have a unified way to manage agents together with their human workers. Industry leaders joined Workday in the new partner network. They include Amazon Web Services Inc., Auditoria.AI Inc., Compa Technologies Inc., Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd., Glean Technologies Inc., IBM Corp., Kainos Group plc, Paradox Interactive AB and Workboard Inc. "AWS is powering the future of AI agent development through Amazon Bedrock's comprehensive foundation model ecosystem and enterprise-grade development framework," said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of agentic AI at AWS. "With Workday's Agent System of Record, organizations will be much better positioned to ethically manage all these agents." AI Widgets will allow developers to easily add custom prompts included in user interfaces to their apps through AI-enabled interfaces. For example, an AI widget UI chatbox could help customer support automate answers to common questions or guide users through tasks. Developers can now integrate new Workday AI services natively directly into apps using the API. This will allow them to use their own UIs and user experience. This will let users ask questions using natural language, generate reports and have other AI experiences directly inside apps that can query Workday resources. The company said it's also expanding the Developer Copilot, its conversational AI codeveloper that allows developers to work faster, with Workday Extend, a low-code no-code tool that allows users to quickly take ideas from alpha mode to deployment. Grippo said using Extend has been a powerful tool for nontechnical workers to bring ideas to life that otherwise they would not be able to create. By combining it with Copilot, it will combine the best of both worlds, helping bridge the gap between the highly technical and those with less coding experience who are just throwing together more simple applications. Using Copilot, developers can generate app code snippets and data queries, find the right APIs and quickly generate functional document orchestrations. The company said it is also introducing a new command-line interface called Workday Developer CLI that will help developers automate development tasks and collaborate more effectively. That will allow development teams to work more effectively with operations teams for DevOps workflows, such as continuous integration, testing and deployment. The new tools such as Agent Gateway will be available to early adopter customers by the end of 2025. The rest of the tools, including the new AI Gateway Services, AI widgets and new Developer Copilot capabilities with Extend and the Developer CLI, will be generally available by the end of 2025.