Introducing Workday VNDLY Contingent Sourcing Agent: The Next Era of Total Workforce Management

In this article we discuss:

• Solving the Reality Today: Speed, Quality, and Cost
• Delivering Immediate Value for Customers
• Moving from System of Record to System of Action

Program teams today are under constant pressure to deliver speed, quality, and cost optimization, 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, program 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 labor 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 organizations 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 optimize sourcing at scale.

Solving the Reality Today: Speed, Quality, and Cost

In high-volume extended workforce management, contingent program teams are consistently measured against three core metrics: speed (time-to-fill), candidate quality, and cost savings. Yet, most program 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 organizations 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.

Delivering Immediate Value for Customers

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 utilize existing talent pools in VNDLY to their fullest.”

Kiley's experience reflects what Early Adopters are seeing across three key areas:

• Smarter, Faster Screening: Automated applicant grading reduces screening time from hours to seconds, allowing teams to prioritize top talent immediately.
• Lower Sourcing Costs and Time-to-Offer: Talent rediscovery turns your internal database into a warm talent pool, cutting out redundant supplier cycles and reducing overall sourcing spend.
• Responsible, Human-in-the-Loop AI: The agent provides transparent rationales for its grades and recommendations, keeping human decision-makers in control while actively mitigating bias.

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.

Moving from System of Record to System of Action

Workday VNDLY has long served as an industry-leading system of record for contingent labor and statement of work, excelling at tracking, operationalizing, 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 labor programs source critical workers.

The agent launches with two skills:

• Contingent talent rediscovery surfaces AI-powered recommendations from candidates already in your tenant whose experience, location, and prior roles align with the job's requirements. Recommendations appear in a dedicated tab on the job for hiring managers and program managers to review, creating clear delineation between current applicants and AI recommendations.
• Contingent applicant grading accelerates screening time by intelligently matching job requirements to resumes, applying a grade, and summarizing the reasoning behind it. This empowers teams with insights to quickly focus on top matches.

Looking Ahead: The Next Era of Talent Orchestration

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 customizable query workflows.

By bringing total workforce super intelligence directly into the vendor management system, we're helping contingent program teams work faster, smarter, and with greater business impact.

See how Workday's Contingent Sourcing Agent helps your team find top candidates faster.