Microsoft and Workday collaborate to manage agentic AI workers

Workday and Microsoft want to make it simpler for developers to register the AI agents they create using Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and Copilot Studio in Workday’s Agent System of Record (ASOR). They say this will help enterprises more securely manage their workers, both human and agentic.

Agents built with the Microsoft tools each receive a Microsoft Entra Agent ID, giving them verified individual identities and allowing administrators to define the permissions and access they’re entitled to, and Workday’s ASOR will provide the business context for their operation. That means agents will be able to interoperate.

For example, Workday said, an employee could ask a Microsoft Employee Self Service Agent in Microsoft Copilot to update their career goals: The agent would hand off the request to the Workday agent, which would perform the necessary tasks to complete the request without requiring the employee to leave the Microsoft agent.

Workday is extending its finance and human resources management platform to encompass digital workers on its own and other platforms, said Mickey North Rizza, IDC group vice president, enterprise software. “This system can be used to integrate and manage Workday agents as well as third-party agents. Workday is taking this opportunity forward to become a system of record for all workers — be they digital or human.”

In addition, agent analytics within Workday ASOR log which agents are in use, by whom, and how, providing detailed reports on productivity impact. And since agents built with the Microsoft tools have individual Entra IDs, administrators can verify that each is working as expected, with no unnecessary access rights or unusual behavior.

An ecosystem

“We’re addressing a very acute need that we’re hearing from customers,” said Charles Lamanna, president, business and industry Copilot at Microsoft, in an interview, noting that every company he’s spoken to recently wants to bring in AI agents, “almost like AI coworkers”, and they’re trying to figure out how they can do it in a safe and secure way.

The two organizations share a vision, added Gerrit Kazmaier, president of product and technology at Workday. “AI is not a single vendor solution. I think AI actually is not even a vendor solution. It’s an ecosystem that emerges on shared data, shared governance and shared intelligence across a network of systems.”

With the announcement, Kazmaier said, the program enters the early adopter phase during which customers can try it out and provide feedback before it becomes generally available.

“One of the really important elements of both our joint strategies is this idea of that open ecosystem,” Lamanna said. “So if someone wants to use the Entra Agent ID, anyone can use that. That’s a fully open capability, it’s a protocol. Any other large hyperscaler or application vendor or AI lab can use that API and start to provision agents which take advantage of it inside the Microsoft ecosystem, because we don’t want to have our customers end up in a world where it’s fractured between how people get jobs done and how you secure your human workers versus the AI agents.”

Rizza said that, since most organizations are using Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, the partnership gives them the ability to bring their agents into the Workday Agent System of Record where they can be governed, managed, and optimized as part of the digital workforce.

“It totally takes the Microsoft agents into a new area and helps them to be secure and utilized by the clients as needed,” she said. “It is a great pathway for Workday to bring these agents into their system as it is meeting what it set out to do in February,” when it launched ASOR.

Melody Brue, VP and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, added, “With this deal, Microsoft gets access to Workday’s enterprise customer base for AI agent deployment, and may reduce implementation complexity for their shared customers. This could create competitive pressure on standalone identity management providers and strengthen Microsoft’s position against Google Cloud and AWS in enterprise AI infrastructure. For organizations using both platforms, it eliminates the need for separate AI governance systems.”