Introducing Pilot Access to Workday’s Open Developer Platform

In this article we discuss:

• From Closed to Open: The New Workday Developer Platform 
• Meeting Developers Where They Are
• Workday’s First Developer Day in India
• What’s Next

At DevCon, we said we were rewriting the developer playbook—opening our platform so both humans and agents can build on Workday more easily, without compromising the security and trust enterprises depend on. And now, we're fulfilling that promise. Pilot access to the Workday Open Developer Program is now available: developers can join the waitlist to get their own Workday tenant and start building.

From Closed to Open: The New Workday Developer Platform

For most of Workday's history, building on the platform required an invitation. You needed someone to vouch for you—a customer, a partner, an employer who could grant access. That made sense in an era when closed and controlled was the enterprise gold standard.

That era is ending. Agentic AI is rewriting the developer playbook: workflows once driven manually by humans are now executed programmatically by AI agents, and companies locked in a closed posture will struggle to keep pace.

That's why Workday is opening its ecosystem. We're giving a broader, more diverse community of developers and partners the tools to build, share, and scale AI-powered solutions directly on the Workday platform—with new access to our applications, data, and AI. Partners and developers can now customize Workday, extend its capabilities, and ship AI innovations faster, all backed by the trust and security Workday is known for.

None of this comes at the expense of security. Developers can build with Google Antigravity, Microsoft Copilot, Cursor, or systems of their own making—lawfully, scalably, and inside Workday's trusted security rails.

Meeting Developers Where They Are

To meet this moment, our developer ecosystem needs to be open—and global. There’s never been a bigger opportunity for developers to build a career with Workday’s platform, and nowhere is that more clear than in India.

India has both the demand and the supply. More than 1800 Workday customers operate in India today, and that number keeps growing. A single hiring site lists over 4,000 open Workday developer jobs in India, and the talent to fill them already exists. The Open Developer Program gives those thousands of interested developers a clear path to becoming Workday developers, growing the ecosystem across India in the process.

And the community is already organizing itself. Multiple user groups across India run entirely independently of Workday, led by developers and practitioners across India who host meetups, share knowledge, and help newcomers get started. That momentum is why India is central to this shift at Workday.

Workday’s First Developer Day in India

Workday's first Developer Day marked our first developer event in India and the first real-world test of self-serve tenant access at this scale. It brought together two kinds of Workday builders for the very first time: Built on Workday partners and new Workday developers joining through our new self-serve access pilot.

Partner teams spent 24 hours in a hackathon building Marketplace-ready apps with Developer Agent—a new way to build AI apps and agents on Workday using natural language in tools like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and Google Antigravity. Partner teams got pilot access to Developer Agent during the event, and several partners credited it as a co-author of their hackathon apps.

The new developer cohort started from a different place entirely. Half knew Workday as users or functional practitioners but had never touched the developer side. The other half were brand new to the ecosystem but eager to learn.

By the end of the event, new developers who had arrived with no prior Workday knowledge were building applications their own teams could plausibly use. In under 48 hours, they went from a cold start—on tenants they'd only just been granted—to a working app. Some left so inspired that they now want to pursue a career as a Workday developer or become a partner.

The best part? Watching both cohorts innovate together. Partners mentored the next generation of Workday developers, and newcomers experienced commercial-grade Workday development first-hand. But the clearest, most repeated feedback wasn't about Developer Agent or the hackathon. Attendees were vocal about how much it mattered to them that we showed up in person, in India.

What’s Next

What started as a pilot is developing quickly. Our open platform is maturing, and our global ecosystem is growing. Conversations are already underway about follow-on meetups in Hyderabad, Mumbai, Kolkata, and Chennai, and we have upcoming Developer Days in Sydney and Tokyo.

Are you ready to become a Workday developer yourself? Starting today, developers can request access to our program by joining the waitlist.