Workday aims to manage AI agents like employees

California-based software provider Workday announced today the Workday Agent System of Record as part of its Workday Illuminate strategy to help organizations manage their AI agents.

“When you look across what capabilities are needed to manage employees and also role-based agents, these needs are actually tightly aligned with capabilities like lifecycle management, workforce optimization, governance, and compliance,” said its chief product officer David Somers in a press conference.

The new Agent System of Record is intended to give organizations the ability to manage Workday agents and third-party agents in one place, while providing tools for governing, managing, and optimizing them. It provides tools to onboard new AI agents, define their roles and responsibilities, track their effectiveness, budget and forecast their costs, support compliance, and foster continuous improvement.

At its Workday Rising event in September, the company rolled out Illuminate, its next-gen agentic AI platform, along with four AI agents: Recruiter, Expenses, Succession, and Optimize. Recruiter is for sourcing candidates, recommending talent, and automating outreach and interview scheduling. Expenses creates, submits, and approves expense reports. Succession automates the succession planning process, prompting managers to create succession plans. It also recommends successors, and generates personalized development plans. Optimize identifies bottlenecks, inefficiencies and deviations from the company’s best practices.

Role with it

Workday has adopted an agentic AI strategy around what it dubs role-based AI agents. Most AI agents in the market today are task-based and follow specific step-by-step instructions. Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach believes task-based agents must evolve into role-based agents, which contain a configurable set of skills that give them more autonomy and the ability to better support humans in particular roles.

“The future of agents is when they become role-based,” he said in the same press conference. “These role-based agents will maybe start out with a skill, but over time they will have many skills. This is how we will truly unlock the power of AI.”

The company also announced today a slate of new agents to its lineup, including:

• Contract agent: This agent analyzes contracts, delving into unstructured data to surface obligations and opportunities, and drive business actions to capture value and mitigate risk.
• Payroll agent: This one identifies and updates invalid payroll dates, automates audit workflows, surfaces insights, and recommends fixes. It monitors compliance and delivers system updates.
• Financial auditing agent: This agent connects business documents to monitor transactions, reconcile balances, and review internal controls. Audit firms can develop apps that connect directly to their Workday customers.
• Policy agent: This one monitors a company’s corporate policy details and sends information to employees and managers whenever they’re asking questions or doing work.

“Whether you’re an HR or finance or business leader, these role-based agents will revolutionize how you and your teams work,” Somers said.

Workday agents and third-party agents will be featured in Workday Marketplace. Somers said the Workday Agent System of Record and the new role-based agents are currently in development, and he expects them to become available later this year.