Workday DevCon 2026: Going Agentic, Building the Future

In this article we discuss:

• The DevCon Experience
• What to Expect at This Year’s Event
• Be Part of DevCon 2026

My heart was racing. I'd just joined Workday, and I was on stage at our 2019 Hackathon, ready to teach a room of hackers how to use a new API framework we were piloting. I looked around at the huge room in front of me, feeling nervous and starstruck at the well-known industry faces in the crowd.

But I'd rehearsed this demo a thousand times. I was ready. This was my moment. And then? My demo broke.

One of the new underlying services briefly went down. In front of everyone. I took a big swing, and I felt like I had whiffed it. While our incredible engineers quickly brought the service back up, I was needed back on the hack floor for tech support.

But as I went from table to table, still rattled, I realized—no one else was. These were developers. They knew we were showing off pilot technology that was a little rough around the edges. That's why they were there!

Developers don't see a broken thing and feel embarrassed for you. They see it and immediately want to know why it broke. They're gathering around the proverbial car with the hood open, wanting to diagnose, learn, and fix something together.

In the world of developers, real beats polished every time. At Workday DevCon, this ethos is on full display. 

DevCon makes space for that very special brew of curiosity and camaraderie—and the slight thrill of a problem that needs to be solved right away. The event gives developers the tools and space to build together, so they can build things that matter.

The DevCon Experience

What does that ethos look like in practice? Last year at DevCon, we launched our Developer MVP program, recognizing leaders in our community pushing the platform in ways we never imagined. One of those MVPs, a customer developer, built Extend apps that helped find relief and safe homes for coworkers displaced by the crisis in Ukraine. A real tool, deployed in a real crisis, helping real people when it mattered most.

Another MVP, a partner developer, saw a gap during Workday implementations and built Marketplace apps to seamlessly audit tenant security. What started as solving a problem they were experiencing became a solution other partners and customers could use.

That's not a feature request that made it onto a roadmap somewhere. That's a developer who saw something that needed to exist and made it exist. They built something that mattered.

Workday's innovation will be featured at DevCon. But the thing is, that innovation is never fully ours—it’s also yours. Our customers, our partners, and our developers are the ones who take the platform and act upon it to create a better, more interconnected, enriched Workday experience for over 70 million users around the world.

What to Expect at This Year’s Event

Agents, for one. Yes, the "A" word. They're front and center, because of course they are. It's 2026. But here's the thing: You're not going to see a keynote full of aspirational demos. What you will see is developers pointing agentic capabilities at real-world problems. The real thing in action.

Very Live Demo is back, and it's taking over. Last year we debuted it in the center of the expo. This year? It's everywhere. Every corner of DevCon, every session, and every demo. Real code. Real APIs. Real developers showing you what they built, right there, live. If something breaks, we'll figure it out together.

We're introducing Chalk Talks, a new session format featuring a Workday expert and a whiteboard. No laptop. No slides. Just a quick intro talk on the subject—app architecture, security and governance, agent development, connecting to third parties with Data Cloud—and then the audience comes up and discusses it right there with them.

How do you decide what apps to build? What makes contextual security work in an Extend app? Let's figure it out together, in real time, at the board.

The hackathon has a learner track now. All the fun and experience of the hackathon, without the pressure to compete. Build agentic apps with hundreds of new friends. Learn something. Break something. Fix it. That's the point!

Our Developer MVPs are center stage this year. We launched this program at DevCon last year, and now it's entering its first full year. These are the leaders of our community—partners and customer developers who work closely with us to be the voice of developers and advocates for the platform. They are the ones proving, without a shadow of a doubt, that "Workday Developer" is a career path worth taking seriously.

We're also kicking off Developer Meetups and a new Ambassador program. Workday developers can now plan and organize meetups anywhere in the world. All we ask: Learn something new and meet someone new. We'll be running loads of these meetups live at the conference. Come to one!

Workday Pro Certification is back by popular demand, and we're offering it at a significant discount at DevCon. Kick things off right with a credential that proves you know your stuff.

And here's a big one: Later this year, we're beginning to expand the developer program, opening it up to more new developers—not just partners and customers. The gates are starting to lower. We're laying the groundwork for a future much bigger than what exists today, and it all starts at DevCon. This is a true before-and-after moment, and you're invited to be part of it.

Be Part of DevCon 2026

If you've never been to DevCon, this is the year.

The tooling has gotten incredibly powerful. The community is growing fast. And we're opening the doors wider than they have ever been. This is the moment to get in, not five years from now when the platform is even bigger, but right now, when you can still be part of shaping what comes next.

DevCon is for builders. That's it. If you've got that spark—the thing that makes you want to figure out how it works and make it do something new—you belong here. You don't even need to be a partner or a customer developer yet. You just need to want to build something that matters.

Learn more and register for this year’s Workday DevCon.