DevCon 2025: Community, Innovation, and a Look at What’s Next

In this article we discuss:

• Unveiling the Future: Key Announcements From DevCon
• Cultivating Expertise and Community
• Innovation in Action: The DevCon Hackathon
• Looking Forward: The Journey Continues

The energy was palpable, the ideas were flowing, and the future of innovation was on full display at Workday DevCon 2025. This year's event brought together a vibrant community of developers, partners, and innovators. Our aim was to create a dynamic space where ideas flourish, connections are made, and we collectively push the boundaries of what’s possible.

With over 1,300 attendees joining in person and almost 3,000 more participating digitally, DevCon 2025 was a testament to the power of collaboration and shared vision. From the bustling expo floor to the insightful breakout sessions and the dynamic Hackathon, the passion and dedication of our developer community shone through every moment. Let’s take a look back at some of the key moments. 

Unveiling the Future: Key Announcements From DevCon

The future of work is undergoing rapid transformation, largely driven by the accelerated advancement of AI and the increasing significance of data. This moment presents us with a unique opportunity to actively shape future developments. 

At DevCon this year, we focused on this very imperative: empowering our community to build innovative solutions on the Workday platform. To that end, we introduced a unified, AI-powered developer experience that’s designed to consolidate essential tools for building applications, orchestrations, and intelligent agents into a single, streamlined toolchain. 

This approach not only integrates existing capabilities but also significantly augments them, aiming to deliver enhanced developer productivity by embedding AI directly into workflows. We also announced several game-changing features that are set to significantly impact how developers build and integrate solutions.

AI-Powered Developer Toolset

A major highlight was the unveiling of a new unified AI developer toolset, designed to bring the power of Workday Illuminate directly into the hands of customer and partner developers. This toolset is engineered to enable easy customization and connection of AI apps and agents on the Workday platform. This AI-powered developer toolset removes barriers, empowering developers to seamlessly integrate powerful AI capabilities into the apps and agents that will define the future of work.

This comprehensive toolset includes several key features, including:

• Agent Gateway: This new framework will allow developers to connect third-party agents to the Workday Agent System of Record (ASOR) for seamless agent registration and agent-to-agent collaboration. Partners can enroll in Workday’s new Agent Partner Network and list their agents on the Workday Marketplace. 
• AI Widgets: Developers will be able to add AI-powered widgets into apps and define custom prompts, offering users personalized AI assistance for quickly creating and refining content across HR and finance use cases.
• Expanded AI Gateway APIs: These new APIs allow developers to natively integrate new Workday AI services into Extend apps, enabling users to ask questions about reports and understand documents using natural language.

Developer Copilot Expansion

Additionally, we’re significantly expanding Developer Copilot, a conversational AI companion designed to help developers code faster across Workday Extend. This enhanced tool now provides capabilities to generate app code snippets and data queries, find optimal APIs with high-context recommendations, and generate and document orchestrations. In fact, Workday Developer Copilot has been shown to increase developer productivity by more than 50%.

Workday Developer CLI

To further streamline development workflows, we also introduced the new Workday Developer CLI (command-line interface) tool. This tool helps automate development tasks, foster more effective collaboration, and integrate Workday into DevOps workflows. 

These powerful new capabilities are expected to be generally available by the end of 2025, with Agent Gateway available to early adopter customers in the same timeframe.

Cultivating Expertise and Community

DevCon highlighted Workday's continued commitment to fostering a thriving developer community and providing clear pathways for professional growth. A significant announcement was the reimagining and relaunch of the Developer Stars program as the Dev MVP Program. This highly selective program will recognize one of 20 developers annually, positioning them as a key representative of the Workday Developer program. These individuals will benefit from a direct feedback loop with Workday and serve as an extension of the Workday Developer Relations team.

Another cornerstone of this commitment is the Workday Developer Forum, a dedicated space for developers, by developers. Within this active community, the heaviest contributors provide immense value by answering questions, sharing sample code, and teaching new developers. To recognize these outstanding contributions, we’re introducing a new award for quarterly Top Contributors, with recipients receiving special recognition and new badges.

Another big investment at DevCon was the Workday Pro certification program, allowing our developer community to get their skills officially validated. For the first time ever, attendees could obtain their Pro certification directly at the event. Developers earned hundreds of certifications on-site, marking a substantial increase in the number of Workday Pros.

Innovation in Action: The DevCon Hackathon

A major highlight and a true testament to the innovative spirit of DevCon is our annual Hackathon. This high-energy competition provided a unique platform for participants to collaborate and build groundbreaking solutions on the Workday platform. We witnessed incredible ingenuity as teams, including Cloverleaf, RSM Dream Team, Team Awoo, and Team Ledger Legends poured their hearts and souls into their projects, showcasing what’s truly possible with Workday’s tools.

A particularly engaging segment during the Hackathon involved special guests from our sponsors—including AWS, Deloitte, Intecrowd, Kainos, KPMG, and PwC. In an ode to Hot Ones, participants bravely answered challenging questions from the developer community while consuming progressively spicier chicken wings. This provided a unique and entertaining way to learn more about our sponsors, their solutions, and their appreciation for the Workday Developer community.

The culmination of the Hackathon was a truly inspiring moment as we celebrated the winners. Team Awoo from TechWolf impressed the judges with their app. The winning team shared an overview of their innovative solution, detailing the specific AI capabilities they leveraged and the challenges they overcame during the competition. Their project truly demonstrated the immense talent and creativity present within the Workday community.

Looking Forward: The Journey Continues

This year’s event truly reinforced the incredible sense of community and the shared drive toward innovation. The passion and dedication demonstrated by attendees and participants alike were truly humbling. The feedback, questions, and breakthroughs generated at the event continue to inspire the commitment to push boundaries and build even better solutions. 

At Workday, we remain dedicated to our developer community, aiming to accelerate innovation and empower individuals to cultivate relevant skills as agentic AI reshapes enterprise technology. And this is just the beginning. Our commitment to continuously evolve the platform, providing the most powerful and intuitive tools to bring ideas to life, remains strong, with a laser focus on empowering individuals to do their best work.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to making DevCon 2025 an electric, insightful, and forward-looking event. The future appears brighter than ever. Keep building, keep innovating, and let’s continue to make amazing things happen together.

Mark your calendars! Workday DevCon will return to Resorts World Las Vegas in June 2026. In the meantime, be sure to check out some of the  content from this year’s event on our YouTube channel.