Introducing Workday VNDLY Contingent Sourcing Agent: The Next Era of Total Workforce Management
Today, Contingent Sourcing Agent is generally available. It reduces time to fill open contingent worker roles with AI-powered grading and recommendations that improve applicant quality and surface spend optimisation opportunities.
Programme teams today are under constant pressure to deliver speed, quality, and cost optimisation, all while navigating strict compliance requirements. Yet the tools they rely on weren't built for this.
Traditional vendor management systems function as static systems of record, capturing what happened, but doing little to shape what happens next. Sourcing remains manual and reactive: requisitions sit in queues, candidate screening eats up days, and workers who performed well on past engagements vanish from view instead of being redeployed. And without intelligent automation, programme managers are trapped behind manual work—resulting in prolonged time-to-hire, inflated costs, and proven enterprise talent slipping away.
At Workday, we believe managing contingent labour shouldn't feel like a compromise between speed and control. Today, we're announcing the general availability of VNDLY Contingent Sourcing Agent, a Workday-native AI agent that transforms how organisations source, evaluate, and redeploy contingent talent. It's a first step toward our larger vision: evolving the vendor management system from that static system of record into an agentic system of action, where program teams optimise sourcing at scale.
In high-volume extended workforce management, contingent programme teams are consistently measured against three core metrics: speed (time-to-fill), candidate quality, and cost savings. Yet, most programme teams find themselves caught in operational bottlenecks. Manually sifting through applicant pools, navigating disjointed systems, and waiting on supplier sourcing cycles leads to friction and missed opportunities. Without the right tools to exert real-time influence, qualified talent slips through the cracks, time-to-offer stretches out, and organisations spend unnecessary dollars re-sourcing candidates they’ve already vetted.
The problem is no longer a lack of data. It's a lack of orchestration.
Contingent Sourcing Agent is that orchestration layer, and its impact is felt immediately. Customers in our Early Adopter program are already seeing results.
“My hope is for AI functionality that is practical, embedded into workflows, and easy for users to understand and trust. I think the Contingent Sourcing Agent is a great example that aligns with this, and I was excited to be part of the Early Adopter program,” said Kerry Kiley, director, global contingent workforce, Rimini Street. “We’re early in our journey with this, but I can see how it will reduce our time-to-fill ratios even further by speeding up screening times and helping us utilise existing talent pools in VNDLY to their fullest.”
Kiley's experience reflects what Early Adopters are seeing across three key areas:
Transparency is built into the core of this agent, with summaries and insights available to ensure teams understand exactly how the agent calculated the grades and recommendations, supporting fair decision making. In addition, Workday is committed to the responsible development and deployment of AI features and we aim to address potential bias through both careful design and structured fairness testing to evaluate whether the agent produces differential outcomes across protected demographic groups.
“My hope is for AI functionality that is practical, embedded into workflows, and easy for users to understand and trust. I think Contingent Sourcing Agent is a great example that aligns with this.”
Kerry Kiley
Director, Global contingent workforce
Rimini Street
Workday VNDLY has long served as an industry-leading system of record for contingent labor and statement of work, excelling at tracking, operationalising, and governing the end-to-end program management lifecycle. Our vision is to evolve VNDLY beyond a system of record into a dynamic system of action—one that doesn't just record work, but advances it. The Workday VNDLY Contingent Sourcing Agent is a critical step toward that vision. It operates directly in the flow of work, accelerating applicant reviews and surfacing past talent whose experience aligns with open role requirements, fundamentally transforming how contingent labour programmes source critical workers.
The agent launches with two skills:
The release of Contingent Sourcing Agent marks an exciting milestone in Workday’s vision for an agentic workforce platform. As we expand this solution, our focus for the future remains on deepening capabilities, such as enabling multi-modal talent sourcing across broader enterprise ecosystems, introducing interactive conversational AI for real-time collaboration, and offering customisable query workflows.
By bringing total workforce super intelligence directly into the vendor management system, we're helping contingent programme teams work faster, smarter, and with greater business impact.
See how Workday's Contingent Sourcing Agent helps your team find top candidates faster.
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