Workday Rewrites the Developer Playbook at DevCon

In this article we discuss:

• Keeping Trust, But Adding Speed
• The Developer Gold Rush
• Permanently Rewriting the Playbook
• Agents Need Enterprise Truth

Workday’s DevCon conference kicked off officially Tuesday morning with a keynote presentation and demo of new capabilities enabled by its open developer platform. Developers from around the world – nearly 10,000 of them, including 1,500 in-person in Las Vegas – joined to learn about how Workday is making it easier for both humans and agents to innovate.

With sessions and workshops packed to capacity with veteran and first-time attendees, there was unmistakable excitement—and some initial questions—as developers learned what Workday’s new approach would mean for them and their organizations. At the top of everyone’s mind: Agents.

Here’s a look at what leaders had to say on day one of DevCon:

1. "We're keeping, the trust, but we’re adding the speed."

Historically, said Workday Chief Technology Officer Gabe Monroy in the Tuesday morning keynote, there’s been a “Workday way” of building. That’s changing, he said. 

“We are opening up the platform but we’re also making sure we keep all the security that matters,” he told attendees. “As we change the platform, how you think about building on Workday is going to change. We’re going to bring you closer to the broader developer community.” 

Monroy cast a vision for attendees, promising that a new Workday ecosystem will make it easy to build across different programs. Google Gemini, Microsoft CoPilot, or a system developers have built themselves will all work with the new capabilities unveiled at the conference for companies that want to build agents within Workday’s trusted security rails. 

Read more from Monroy here. 

2. "Now is our gold rush."

Attendees at the conference are builders at heart – approaching their jobs the same way a kid (or an adult) approaches a pile of Legos. With that in mind, Incubane Managing Partner Matt Komendolowicz, in a fireside chat with Workday Developer Relations Leader Nick Moores, stressed the opportunity for developers in a time of transition and new, exciting AI tools. 

“Right now is the best time ever to be a developer,” Komendolowicz said. “Because one developer can build stuff quicker than ever before. You have the power to 10x your work. You are becoming the person in the company who can do the work of 10 or 20 other people… now is our gold rush.” 

3. "Permanently rewriting the playbook."

In an interview with Silicon Angle, Workday leader Jay Wieczorkowski highlighted the value of developing on Workday: companies can harness the power of AI without giving away any of their “secret sauce.” 

Historically, this has been done by putting Workday and agentic capabilities close together. The new capabilities unveiled at DevCon take it a step further, embedding agentic AI into the system itself and completely rethinking the interface, the way things get built and work gets done. 

“Agentic AI is not incremental change for developers; it’s permanently rewriting the playbook,” Wieczorkowski, who is vice president and general manager of developer platform, told SiliconANGLE.

4. "Agents need enterprise truth."

Mapping out the exact tools and data blueprints that will make Workday’s open network a reality, VP of AI Platform Dean Arnold underscored the importance of  standards and transparency. He also noted that agents need something built from the ground up to think, plan, and execute.  

“Agents need enterprise truth,” Arnold explained to attendees. “And truth is the data and context that runs the business.”  

To deliver that truth safely without making developers piece together their own security, Arnold demoed a suite of Workday’s new agent-ready tools that feature simplified, self-describing structures and come with built-in security, delegation, and auditing.  

From there, the focus shifted to Agent Actions, which lets agents plug into over 1,000 outside systems, and Workday Orchestrate for wiring those actions into predictable, step-by-step workflows. 

This entire data ecosystem is getting a massive boost through a new partnership with AWS. By making Workday Data Cloud a first-class data source for services like Amazon Bedrock, developers get a straightforward, SQL-like way to safely mix Workday info with outside data sets.  

Arnold added that with these new tools, “We have everything we need to build an agent.”