During the Innovation Keynote, Workday leaders shared how Workday Illuminate will accelerate manual tasks, provide real-time assistance, and transform entire business processes.
One of the most anticipated moments at Workday Rising is the Innovation Keynote, when Workday unveils its latest solutions. Co-Founder and Executive Chair Aneel Bhusri emphasized the importance of innovation as a core value for Workday during the keynote on Tuesday.
“Our focus is on continually innovating for you,” Bhusri said.
At the center of that innovation was the announcement of Workday Illuminate—Workday’s next-generation AI. Available now, Workday Illuminate includes capabilities for accelerating manual tasks, delivering real-time AI assistance, and transforming entire business processes with AI orchestration.
Bhusri acknowledged that the tech industry is in the middle of an AI hype cycle, and “the key to AI is delivering real business value.” Workday has more than a decade of experience with AI, including generative AI capabilities, AI Gateway within Workday Extend, and Workday AI Marketplace.
Workday Illuminate is the next big leap on Workday’s ongoing AI roadmap, and its value will play out in many real-world scenarios.
Bhusri talked about a world of HR where AI transforms the manager experience to help managers quickly find and grow the best talent on their teams.
He challenged the audience to imagine a world where the creation, validation, and accounting of all business transactions is virtually touchless and accounts are self-reconciling.
Also on Tuesday, Workday announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Evisort, a leading AI-native document intelligence platform. With Evisort, Workday will add AI-powered document intelligence solutions across its finance and HR suite.
With AI continuing to dominate tech industry headlines, it can be difficult to understand what’s real and what’s hype. Shane Luke, vice president of AI and machine learning, reiterated that Workday is intent on delivering real value.
He gave a quick tutorial on the large language models (LLMs) AI depends on, noting that general purpose LLMs fall short for enterprise needs because they’re trained on broad swaths of information across the web.
That’s where Workday Illuminate is different. It relies on a massive financial and HR dataset from 10,500 customers that’s constantly growing, with 800 billion transactions processed by Workday’s platform every year. And Workday has built a sophisticated, enterprise-grade LLM platform to maintain the privacy and security of 70 million users.
Luke highlighted how you need models trained on high-quality, large-scale data, and the context of your specific needs to make AI truly work for your business.
Workday also announced four new AI Agents: Recruiter, Expenses, Succession, and Workday Optimize, all powered by Workday Illuminate.
The Recruiter Agent builds on capabilities available in HiredScore, an AI talent acquisition and mobility solution Workday acquired earlier this year. Workday and HiredScore customers are already seeing a 25% increase in recruiter capacity following the acquisition, and Recruiter Agent will take that a step further to proactively source passive candidates, automate outreach, and recommend top talent for open roles.
The agent streamlines tasks like creating job descriptions, sourcing candidates, and scheduling interviews, and provides AI-powered insights into candidate profiles. It also integrates with communication platforms like Microsoft Teams.
This kind of AI-powered recruitment assistance is particularly beneficial during a time when finding the right talent is becoming increasingly difficult, according to a new Global Workforce Report by Workday.
The new Expenses Agent automatically creates and submits expense reports with AI. For example, an employee traveling might receive a text message prompting them to upload their breakfast receipt as soon as they complete their transaction. The system will match the receipt with the credit card transaction and create the expense line automatically.
The Succession Agent helps organizations find and grow future leaders. It can proactively prompt managers to update their succession plans, automatically recommend successors from across the organization, and generate personalized development plans for top talent to help them prepare for their next role.
And finally, the Optimize Agent streamlines business processes in Workday. It identifies bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and deviations from best practices. For example, it can automatically flag and fix issues in the employee onboarding process, such as manual data entry or out-of-order steps.
The Expenses, Succession, and Optimize Agents are expected to become available in 2025. Recruiter Agent is available now in HiredScore, and will become even more integrated with Workday in spring 2025.
Also included in Tuesday’s announcements was the new Workday Assistant. Workday has evolved the offering from a chatbot to a full-fledged, AI-powered natural language assistant, and it’s available now.
According to Ali Fuller, senior vice president of experience, Workday Assistant will provide a natural language companion throughout the Workday experience, from search to support, to provide you with what you need and where you need to go.
Customers are already benefiting from improved findability leveraging AI with Workday Assistant, Fuller noted, sharing that it’s saved Workday’s global customers five million minutes of time just since April.
In one demo, attendees watched how a manager, looking for expense information to plan a team offsite, could type a question in the AI search bar and get a quick answer about their remaining budget for the year. Another example was an employee with a question about their paycheck.
“Because Workday Assistant understands who you are and what you’re looking at, it can explain payslip details for you just like someone on the HR team could,” said Katie Holden, vice president, software development.
In addition, Workday is further enhancing this experience by expanding its integrations to include Microsoft 365 Copilot and Slack, enabling employees to get answers from Workday Assistant using natural language within these environments.
Chief Product Officer David Somers wrapped up the keynote emphasizing the excitement, possibilities, and value customers will realize with Workday.
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