Developer Agent, Custom Agents, and Agent-Ready Tools are now generally available as part of Workday Extend AI—a comprehensive developer toolkit to build and run agents lawfully inside Workday’s guardrails.
In this article we discuss:
There’s never been a more exciting time to be a developer.
Agentic AI has handed developers unprecedented leverage, turning weeks of work into minutes. But when it comes to the core of the enterprise—people and money—disconnected, "vibe-coded" solutions don't cut it. Accidental architecture isn't just a minor bug; it's a missed payroll, a data breach, or a mandatory meeting with compliance.
Our developer community told us the same thing: they were spending as much time maintaining fragile, ad-hoc AI solutions as they were building new ones, while Workday's own developer tools felt too proprietary and disconnected from the stack they wanted to use. The challenge was clear: Build with speed, keep the trust.
Today at Workday Rising, we’re thrilled to announce that Developer Agent, Custom Agents, and Agent-Ready Tools are generally available as part of Workday Extend AI.
Together, they deliver a complete, enterprise-grade developer toolkit, giving you the freedom to innovate with your favorite agentic stack while ensuring your agents run securely and lawfully within Workday guardrails.
Since we unveiled Developer Agent at Workday DevCon in June, more than 125 early access customers and partners have used it to build over 6,000 custom apps and agents. The impact was immediate.
Developer Agent accelerated completion of standard coding tasks by 12-40x, and development timelines compressed by 8-10x.
“Developer Agent radically truncates the development timeline, delivering a functioning prototype in weeks with significant cost savings and substantially less risk. This gives you the ability to fix problems as you assess them,” said John Bruce, VP of people innovation and technology at OneDigital.
That’s true leverage: higher throughput, faster time to market, and more time spent solving high-impact business problems instead of writing boilerplate code.
And the outcomes they are generating are game-changing:
“Developer Agent radically truncates the development timeline, delivering a functioning prototype in weeks with significant cost savings and substantially less risk.”
John Bruce
VP of people innovation and technology, OneDigital
Historically, building on Workday required learning our proprietary frameworks and building inside our bespoke tools. In an AI-first world, that’s friction.
Developer Agent eliminates that friction. Choose where you build, describe your use case in plain language, and Developer Agent builds for you.
For example: A developer opens Cursor and prompts Developer Agent to build a custom Internal Mobility Agent that helps managers find the right internal candidates—by matching on skills and performance data, not just job titles—and creates custom transition plans.
Developer Agent scaffolds the agent, connecting it to the right Agent-Ready Tools for skills, performance, and compensation data across Workday. Using Pipedream tools, it reads the company's unique mobility policy rules stored in Google Drive, then extends Workday to create a new business object and business process to store, route, and approve transition plans. The developer previews it, tweaks as necessary, and deploys.
When an agent is changing job structures, approving pay, or closing the books, where it runs can matter just as much as how it was built.
Custom Agents operate lawfully in the Workday Trusted Agent Platform. We accomplish this by running custom agents inside Workday Agent Harness —the same infrastructure we use internally to power our agents.
All it takes is a prompt. Developer Agent builds your Custom Agent, automatically selects the right Agent-Ready Tools, and defines Custom Agents in the open AgentSkills format.
For example: Managers want to land the best internal candidates for their open positions. The developer surfaces the custom Internal Mobility Agent they built with Developer Agent in Gemini Enterprise using A2A, so the manager can use the agent from wherever they are working.
No matter where it's invoked from, the agent still runs inside Workday's guardrails—context stays fresh, rules are respected, and every action remains traceable back to both the human user and the agent.
No doubt your teams already have agents in Claude, Copilot, Gemini, and solutions they built themselves—and naturally, they'll want those agents doing real work in Workday. The question is how those agents get access.
We’ve seen how this can go wrong: create a system account, point an agent at a bundle of APIs designed for system integration, and hope the LLM makes the right decision. And when it doesn’t, it can’t be traced back to the user. It's a context and data security problem.
Agent-Ready Tools deliver a headless pattern you can trust.
For example: A manager asks Copilot to review and approve time off requests for their team. Copilot calls Agent-Ready Tools to retrieve time off requests and absence and leave balances from Workday. Copilot is explicitly granted access to Agent-Ready Tools via the Workday Agent System of Record, and will only return data the manager has access to per Workday security policies.
The manager's approval is validated against company policies configured in Workday, and the entire action is fully auditable with a traceable path back to both the human user and the agent.
We’re tearing down the access walls. Anyone can now create a personal developer account on developer.workday.com. You’ll join the Workday Developer Program and can set up your own personal Workday development environment to build at your own pace (currently in Beta).
That same spirit runs through everything we delivered today. Developer Agent, Custom Agents, and Agent-Ready Tools are open by design. Build in your stack, bring your own agent, surface work where your teams already are. The guardrails are ours. The choices are yours. Let’s go build!
Ready to build on Workday? Create your own personal developer account at developer.workday.com and get started.
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