Workday says it is advancing AI in HR with a series of platform upgrades that handle complex problems and build answers that capture the context around the data.
Workday is broadening its use of AI throughout its HR and finance platforms, promising improved automation and more productivity. In these updates, called Workday Illuminate, the vendor is integrating AI in HR processes broadly, expanding its use in everything from routine tasks such as content generation to more complex issues -- which includes identifying problems in HR processes and recommending improvements.
Illuminate includes a series of AI agents that can be used, for instance, in succession planning, which includes recommending candidates. The company claims that its agent can recommend internal candidates that a customer might not be aware of.
At a press briefing in advance of this week's Workday Rising conference, TechTarget Editorial asked whether the succession planning agent can capture the complexity of the employee experience and accurately assess whether someone has leadership capabilities.
David Somers, chief product officer at Workday, said succession planning is a sensitive area. Still, Workday isn't creating an end-to-end process of hiring, or using technology to diminish the role of the human. He said the agent augments the talent acquisition professional and does not replace human decision-making or the need for an interview panel.
Workday's update includes products that can handle processes from content summarization to more complex tasks such as identifying bottlenecks in onboarding and recommending optimization changes.
"These agents will anticipate and streamline common business workflows to drive productivity and free users up to be more strategic and do more meaningful work," Somers said.
These agents will anticipate and streamline common business workflows to drive productivity and free users up to be more strategic and do more meaningful work.
David SomersChief product officer, Workday
AI capabilities aren't new for Workday, but generative AI in HR, in particular, is delivering a set of rapid changes affecting HR's day-to-day processes. The vendor said its new Illuminate platform, which combines data and the context around it, will give managers, for instance, compensation information specific to company data.
Users can interact with these systems through Workday Assistant, a generative AI chatbot integrated into Microsoft Teams and Slack. Workday Assistant will be generally available early next year.
Josh Bersin, an HR analyst and founder of the Josh Bersin Company, said Workday's new products fall into the AI agents category, a growing product line that includes SAP Joule, which came out last year.
"This will be a huge hit and a lot of focus for the company, but there's a lot of work to do to build all the Workday transactions into it," he said.
Bersin doesn't see a trust issue for Workday employees using Illuminate. It isn't an open platform for non-Workday data, he said.
Bersin's own AI-enabled assistant, Galileo, can tap into his HR services company's library of information and will be able to integrate with Workday's platform.
At this point, Workday is unlikely to face much reluctance from its users to adopt generative AI tools. In two separate surveys of HR leaders conducted this past March and June, Gartner found that AI in HR is being adopted by most organizations, with only 15% indicating that they have no plans to adopt generative AI.
Patrick Thibodeau is an editor at large for TechTarget Editorial who covers HCM and ERP technologies. He's worked for more than two decades as an enterprise IT reporter.
