Why are Salesforce and Workday building an AI employee service agent together?

Salesforce and Workday are partnering to build a new AI-based employee service agent based on a common data foundation, and accessible via their respective software interfaces.

The new AI-based employee service agent, which is akin to the recently released Einstein Service Agent, uses Salesforce’s Einstein 1 platform as the base and connects to Workday’s AI platform, the companies said in a joint statement, adding that the agent uses large language models (LLMs) to communicate with employees in natural language.

The key objective of the partnership, said IDC senior research analyst Erica Spinoni, is to unify HR and financial data from Workday with CRM data from Salesforce in a way that can support AI use cases and improve employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) alike.

The two SaaS companies have lofty ambitions for their partnership but have provided few details of how enterprises will go about training, deploying, and managing such agents, nor have they said which LLMs they will be able to use.

What they have said is that Workday will leverage Salesforce’s Zero Copy Partner Network, enabling enterprise customers to access financial, HR, and CRM data across Salesforce and Workday platforms without having to duplicate data or build custom integrations.

Workday will also enhance its existing integration with Slack to enable enterprise users to access financial and HR records, such as tasks, pay, job requisitions, employee details, and general ledgers through the messaging platform. Slack will store conversations about records accessed so they can be found, summarized, and acted upon, the companies said.

How do enterprises stand to benefit from the Salesforce-Workday partnership?

Potential use cases for the new AI-based employee service agent include seamless onboarding, self-service HR, and continuous development of skills, the companies said. The agent can answer questions related to benefits and policies, enable self-service transactions such as updating healthcare plans, and curate personalized learning paths based on an employee’s roles and skills, they said.

The combination of the two companies’ data in a single platform could also bring enteprises benefits in precision workforce planning, continuous financial planning, and intelligent sales enablement, said Akshara Naik Lopez, senior analyst at Forrester.

“If you look beneath the surface, this collaboration is a story of three most powerful datasets and systems of record coming together — HR, finance and CRM — under one common data foundation with secure and trusted data sharing between the two platforms, without having to duplicate data or build custom integrations,” Lopez said.

“This will allow customers and employees to access and act upon HR, finance and CRM data wherever they are ‘in the flow of their work’ without having to leave one system and go to another,” Lopez explained, adding that the companies have essentially created a federated dataset, which is what drives “true” generative AI outcomes.

Gartner vice president analyst Kyle Davis said the partners’ collaboration on a common data foundation will save them resorting to clunky extract, transform, load (ETL) processes to copy data from Workday into Salesforce’s Data Cloud. “The effort to maintain such large ETL processes could nullify the benefits for most enterprises,” he said.

In addition, said Eric Johnson, director at digital services firm West Monroe, “Building a generative AI solution from scratch is resource intensive. By partnering, Workday can leverage Salesforce’s existing AI infrastructure and expertise, which reduces development time and costs. This collaboration allows both companies to focus on their respective areas of expertise while sharing the financial and developmental burden.

Best-of-breed is back in fashion

The big software vendors have been competing for years to be “the” system of record in the enterprise, but partnerships like this show that they are slowly realizing that collaboration can be more profitable than competition.

“Workday and Salesforce are both strategic data platforms for their clients. By working together, the two mega vendors are hoping to cover a broader range of use cases for the enterprise than they could handle themselves,” said Hyoun Park, chief analyst at Amalgam Insights.

The era of all-in-one platforms is dying and best-of-breed integrations are the new normal to support new technology capabilities, he said.

“Large multi-billion dollar tech companies are seeking to work together to meet enterprise needs because they lack the time and resources to develop everything in house and want to leverage their capabilities as platforms to integrate with other technologies whenever it is possible,” Park said.

Other examples of similar such collaborations might include ServiceNow’s partnership with Boomi on APIs, its partnership with Microsoft to integrate Azure AI with its IT service management platform, or SAP’s partnership with Google Cloud to enhance its AI and machine learning abilities, analysts suggested.