The Future of Work Podcast: Expert Insights & Predictions on the Agentic Wave

Amir Khostavan: Hello and welcome to another episode of Future of Work. The pace of technological change is accelerating faster than ever before. It feels as if we're on the cusp of a new era of productivity and innovation, especially in the world of work. But one thing is clear: Agentic AI is a force that's reshaping industries as we know them.
Agentic AI isn't just automating tasks, but actively collaborating with us, anticipating our needs, and helping us unlock new levels of creativity and efficiency in the workplace. My name is Amir, your host of today's episode, where we're going to explore the incredible opportunities that await those who embrace this transformative technology.
Workday recently brought together leading AI experts and industry visionaries for a groundbreaking event to unveil our latest innovation: The Workday Agent System of Record, a revolutionary platform designed to manage and optimize your entire digital workforce.
Throughout this podcast, you'll hear from Workday’s leadership team as they share their insights on this transformative technology.
Now, let's dive deeper into the world of AI and Workday Agent System of Record, and how it's helping organizations navigate this new landscape and harness the full potential of Agentic AI.
AI agents are systems that perceive details of the surrounding environment, process, and reason the next steps and execute on those steps to achieve specific goals. They can even learn from their experiences, storing those learnings and memory to improve future iterations. These agents and their capabilities represent the next wave of AI in our enterprise
At Workday, we're really excited about the potential of Agentic AI. Our CEO Carl Eschenbach shares more on this massive shift.

Carl Eschenbach: I would venture to say that AI has the potential to have more impact than all tectonic shifts of the past, in aggregate. This is a powerful technology. Not only can it transform our enterprises and how we think about running business, but it can actually change society if done in a safe, respectful and responsible way.
It can have impact on all companies of all sizes. Now, when we think about this from a Workday perspective, a lot of people talk about the AI revolution. Well, we've been preparing for this day for the last decade. For the last decade, we've built machine learning and AI deep into the core of the Workday platform. It's built in.
It's not bolted on. And we're leveraging that incredibly powerful, highly curated data set that we have to train our models and provide business value back to our customers and our partners. This is an incredible time for Workday to leverage the last decade of work to help all of us move into the future.

Khostavan: So it's clear that Agentic AI is poised to have incredible impact. Carl shares more on how Agentic AI and Workday Illuminate are already transforming businesses.

Eschanbach: Now, last fall at Workday Rising, we announced the next generation of Workday.
It’s called Illuminate, and there's three different ways we're applying AI. When we think about illuminate, first, we're leveraging generative AI to help accelerate how people work to work faster, to work smarter. We're leveraging Copilots to assist people in their daily tasks to make them more productive. And last, we talked about transform. How do we leverage AI to truly transform your business?
And when we talked about it, we launched four different agents at rising. In those agents, some of them are into marketing. They're already having major impact.
We're here today not to talk about the assist or accelerate, but really talk about how do we truly transform business through the power of AI? And we know it's all going to be about agents.
Now, this is super exciting. We're all excited about agents and the potential impact it can have in the enterprise. That being said, everyone is talking about a lot of agents. In fact, there's some people out there talking about we're going to have thousands of agents coming into the enterprise, not an agent, literally thousands. This is exciting because of the potential.
At the same time, I said I would talk about risk. Who's onboarding these agents? Who's managing them? Who has governance control access rate over these agents? Today, what we're seeing, they're coming into all different organizations and all different functions. That's a risk. Many of you remember the old adage, shadow it and how we wanted to bring control back into the CIO's office to make sure we were protected in the enterprise.
For me, I remember almost 25 years ago, a technology called virtual machines. Virtual machines were powerful. They could be spun up in literally seconds. And because of the power, then people started to use them very quickly. And you had VM sprawl. What we want to focus on today is how do we avoid agent sprawl? That's what we're talking about.
The question is simple. Who will you trust to bring these agents into the enterprise? And we believe at Workday, we're well positioned to do that.

Khostavan: So there you have it. Carl really helped bring some exactness to what Agentic AI is, and the potential that it can have in the enterprise setting.
Now I want to shift a bit and talk about why this moment and Agentic AI is a whole new ballgame. I would guess that many of us, including you who's listening to this podcast right now, had our first introduction to generative AI when ChatGPT caught the world's attention with its ability to generate human-like text.
What we're seeing today with Agentic AI is taking things to a whole new level. Think of it this way. Imagine you wanted to ask about the weather. In the past, you might have gotten a civil response, like it's raining or it's sunny. But with the Agentic AI, the response is tailored to who's asking and why.
A weather app could give different answers to a TV meteorologist and a parent getting their child ready for school, even offering recommendations alongside the forecast. Instead of just focusing on individual tasks, these role based agents are like having a whole team of experts working together to drive a step function change in productivity.
Aneel Bhusri, Workday’s co-founder and executive chair, explains why this moment is so impactful for the enterprise. Here is Aneel’s perspective.

Aneel Bhusri: I'm just going to take you on the journey that we went through in getting to the announcements we're going to make later today. And it's also part of a personal journey in terms of learning about AI, because it is very, very different than anything I've ever seen in my career. Going back to too many years, I won't talk about how many years, so let's just dive into it.
It was not as easy to understand as every other computer science technology I'd ever seen in my life. And so I really decided to learn from the masters, spent time with founders of the AI companies, including Dario and Anthropic and then my friends at Google. And I kind of opened up a, you know, a new lens into what's happening in the world.
The number one thing, Carl talked about this – It's the most consequential technology I've seen in my lifetime. And the reason is because it's trying to mimic the human brain. It's trying to reason. It's trying to use intuition to make decisions and use pattern recognition. And that's not what any technology we've experienced in our lives has ever done.
We were all excited when the gen AI technology showed up with OpenAI and Anthropic, but really it was about generating content. At Workday, we use it for things like generating job descriptions or filling out procurement forms, but those were not truly impactful for the business. They were nice to have, but they really didn't change the way companies operated.
And then along came the Agentic model where agents act independently, they achieve goals. They learn, they adapt, they make decisions. And to us that felt very enterprise-centric, and it kind of relates well to what an employee does. I'm really excited about where this technology can lead us. And especially for all of our customers.

Khostavan: So, like Aneel said, Agentic AI is empowering people to do their best work, elevating their uniquely human skills that AI cannot replicate. Now let's hear more from Aneel as he paints a vivid picture of how these AI agents will work in practice.

Bhusri: So not to spend a lot of time on this, but why do we think that we're in the right place to be a leader in AI? We have the largest data set, in particular in HR, the single largest HR data set in the world. I think at this point, 70 million employee records. And we've been working on AI for a decade.
It started out with machine learning. We've been doing it. I've been learning how to use the data. And this is just the next evolution. The unique knowledge we have, if you think about agents and think about them as employees, that was a big insight. If you're having an agent work and it's tied to roles and skills.
So you have a set of skills and we capture that with the skills cloud set of skills combines a role as an employee. So at the end of the day these agents are effectively digital employees. Well, a digital employee, like an employee needs to have an identity. They need to know where they sit in the organization. We are the only company that has the org model, right.
So you need to know what security privileges that agent has. You've got to onboard them. You got to offboard them. So the HR system ends up being the right platform to manage the agents and not just the Workday agents, but third party agents as well, and hope for the customers and in the audience. You trust us. And that's a really important part of doing this the right way.
We're going to continue to earn that trust and do it the right way. But we hope that with you, we can figure out ways to deploy these agents in a very safe and secure way.

Khostavan: At Workday, we've been deeply invested in skills for years and developed a rich understanding of how they function within the enterprise. This foundation, combined with our AI innovation, put us in a particularly unique position, to know how AI Agents or digital workers could best be built and then managed.
As these digital workers enter the workforce. It comes with a new set of challenges. How do we ensure these agents are secure? How do we onboard them, govern them? Manage them? How do we prevent agent sprawl and maintain control over this evolving workforce?
At Workday, we recognized that there was a gap in the market. Companies today lacked a central way to manage their AI agents, which posed a big risk. This takes us right into our latest groundbreaking announcement: Workday Agent System of Record.
This big problem we found, a lack of a unified digital workforce platform, is what Workday Agent System of Record was designed to become: a centralized system for managing an organization's entire fleet of AI agents. Let's hear David Sommers, our Chief Product Officer, talk more about Workday Agent System of Record.

David Somers: Imagine having a centralized command center for all of your AI agents. So why manage all of these agents in Workday? Well, when you look across the key capabilities that are needed for both employees and AI agents, the needs there are surprisingly similar.
You need capability around lifecycle management, workforce optimization, governance, and compliance for those agents. And Workday is focused on keeping humans at the center of all of this, always using AI once again to amplify their potential. This human to AI interaction is important now, and it's imperative in the future.
So let's take a minute. Let's dive into the three major components that make up what we call the digital workforce management. Within the agent ecosystem itself, you'll find those native agents that I just mentioned that are built by Workday.
Also, we fully expect all of you, our amazing customers and partners to build agents as well. We also have plans in the near future to allow you to take the agents that our product teams build and allow you to extend those agents yourself to meet your specific needs. And finally, we welcome third party partner agents into the mix, into the ecosystem.
And that's when the magic actually starts to happen. Your custom built agents as customers and those third party partner agents actually interacting with Workday native agents all inside of Workday. This seamless collaboration is powered by the second key component of our digital workforce strategy, something we call the Agent Gateway.

Khostavan: So like David shared, Workday Agent System of Record is going to empower our customers to onboard new agents, define their roles and responsibilities, turn them on or off, track their impact, manage their costs, ensure compliance, and drive continuous improvement, essentially, make sure agents are working effectively and responsibly.
And that's just a glimpse of the exciting things happening in the world of Agentic AI. To learn more about our vision for AI and Workday Agent System of Record, visit workday.com/agenticai.
Thank you for tuning in to The Future of Work, a podcast series where we discuss trends and insights shaping the modern workplace. If you'd like to hear more from us, check out workday.com/podcasts.
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