Since the arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022, generative AI (gen AI) has evolved at breakneck speed. Today, AI enables conversational user experiences and easier, more natural ways of finding information, making every interaction smarter and more intuitive. As a result, AI is quickly becoming the go-to technology most enterprise-level businesses can't do without.
In the recent Workday report, AI IQ: Insights on Artificial Intelligence in the Enterprise, 80% of the 1,000 global decision-makers we surveyed say they view AI and machine learning (ML) as a requirement to keep their businesses competitive. And those that do are seeing results: two-thirds say AI and ML have increased productivity and operational efficiencies, due in large part to improved decision-making (41%), automated business processes (38%), and improved employee retention/experience (35%).
Millions of Workday users share their feedback via system analytics, surveys and on-location field studies, which helps us pinpoint where and how we can improve the user experience (UX). We're using this continuous stream of billions of data points around user behavior and preferences to focus our UX strategy on three key goals: improving findability, simplifying task completion, and meeting users in their natural workflow. Driving these innovations is Workday Assistant, an AI companion that guides users throughout their Workday experience.
Here's how we do it (and how you can, too).
AI solutions that make work easier and enhance the way employees work help them become more efficient, effective, and productive, empowering them to spend less time on rote tasks and more time on meaningful, value-added work.
In practice, this means that the AI capabilities you offer employees should be able to anticipate what they want or need to do, surfacing the relevant features and functionality at just the right moment. Using AI to proactively anticipate the user's needs not only reduces their mental load by removing the requirement of knowing exactly the right command or search term, it also saves time by reducing unnecessary toggling and navigation.
At Workday, our goal is for users to be able to quickly find what they need. For example, the Workday homepage leverages AI to show users relevant, hyper-personalized content specific to their role, right when they need it. A people leader, for example, might see details about their team as well as performance-cycle tasks.
But say they're looking for expense information to plan a team offsite. By typing a question in their own words into the AI search bar, they would get a quick answer about their remaining budget for the year, drawing on a wealth of company data for context. An employee with questions about a recent payslip could also ask Workday Assistant for help, or select from prompts like 'Walk me through this payslip' for a step-by-step explanation with contextual awareness of what they're viewing.
This anticipation of the user's needs leads to significant time savings in the long term. For example, when we gave managers the ability to review and respond to their team's latest time-off requests right from their homepage with one click, it gave managers back more than 30% of the time they spent on approvals.
The second piece of our UX strategy is to make it easier for users to get things done, and AI is key to achieving this. Because many enterprise workflows involve complex, multi-step processes, AI has tremendous potential to guide and assist users, making tasks self-service and reducing the number of help desk tickets. At Workday, we use AI to automate mundane tasks and offer contextual, intuitive guidance to help users tackle the more complex ones.
While most companies know that using generative AI to draft job descriptions can save them countless hours, AI innovation is also happening in complex, high-stakes areas like pay and compensation. Say a manager wants to request a one-time bonus to reward an employee's great work. Because it's not something they do very often, the manager might not recall the allowable pay range or the company's bonus policy off the top of their head. Workday Assistant can provide a quick summary of the relevant information based on their employee profile, the company's policy information, and even the average bonus amounts awarded to peers in the organization.
The opportunities for generative AI extend far beyond this first wave of use cases. AI that can assist you, summarize for you, and write for you can of course save you time -- but AI that can think and act on your behalf can deliver even more transformative effects. These 'AI agents' already show great promise by dramatically shortening business processes and changing the economics for how HR and Finance run.
For example, our Recruiter Agent can streamline hiring tasks across Workday by orchestrating complex and multi-stakeholder business processes, bringing in the right people at the right time to seamlessly contribute and get the work done. The agent automates tasks like creating job descriptions, sourcing candidates, and scheduling interviews, and provides AI-powered insights into candidate profiles. Workday and HiredScore customers have already seen a 25% increase in recruiter capacity, and Recruiter Agent will take that a step further to significantly reduce time-to-fill roles and improve hiring quality. While AI agents are still in their early days for enterprise applications, their scaled potential to remove tedium and elevate performance is enormous.
Many employees now need to use dozens of third-party services to handle all their day-to-day tasks, from email clients and chat programs to expense reports and time-tracking software. All this switching back and forth can be a huge drain on your employees' time, not to mention the extra cognitive load it creates.
AI agents can alleviate some of the pain associated with context-switching when it comes to expense reporting. Our Workday Expenses Agent can be used to automatically create and submit expense reports with near-touchless expense report creation, submission, and approval. For example, an employee traveling might receive a text prompting them to upload their receipt as soon as they complete a transaction at a cafe. The system will match the receipt with the credit card transaction and create the expense line automatically.
You can also increase your employees' productivity by integrating your software into their existing workflows, using the platforms and services they already use. At Workday, for example, our partnerships with Microsoft Teams and Slack make it easy for users to access Workday information and tasks from their preferred workspaces.
This integration can go in either direction. Many of our users stitch together hundreds of applications to cover all their HR and financial needs, requiring them to learn dozens of UIs just to get things done. That's why we are enabling our users to bring their third-party applications directly into the Workday UI. Third-party capabilities, workflows and tasks are woven into the Workday experience, where our AI will be able to quickly find, summarize and assist as needed.
Just think how easy something like annual benefits enrollment could be with everything the user needs to know and act on, all in one place. Rather than requiring employees to remember which app does what, and where to go to find the task they need to do, AI can surface the right capabilities when and where a person needs them -- and remove them when they don't. With seamless integrations into existing workflows, one overall look and feel, and one security model applied to everything, companies can provide an employee experience that reduces complexity and lowers overall costs.
At Workday, our human-centric AI approach is designed to empower people to make faster, smarter decisions. Our UX investments improve findability of the right information at the right time, simplify task completion by automating the mundane and assisting users with more complex tasks, and meeting them in their existing workflows with seamless integration.
Going forward, we see a confluence of changes driven by technology trends such as 5G networks, multimodal LLMs, and real-time language technologies -- all of which will radically change what is possible for user experience. We see a world where AI becomes the UI. AI and UX are not mutually exclusive - together, they create far better user experiences. In the near future, AI will understand language, 'see' what you're seeing, and interpret the world around you.
With UX at the center, the processes of the future will look fundamentally different than they do today. This is the goal we're working towards - an AI experience that completely transforms not just how people interact with Workday, but with the entire workplace around them.
