Workday Brings Employee Benefits Into The Agentic Era
We're launching Workday Total Benefits, the next step in our vision for AI-powered benefits, where AI agents guide every employee to the right benefit decisions and handle the administrative work behind them.
Today, we’re announcing Workday Total Benefits, a new AI-powered solution that brings everything connected to an employee’s benefits into one experience. At its core is Workday Wellness, now generally available, which connects benefit providers directly to Workday, streamlining benefits implementations and automating administration across systems.
For years, employers have had to choose between giving employees a great benefits experience and keeping costs and administrative work under control. Our vision at Workday is to end that compromise—and with AI, it's finally possible. With Workday Total Benefits, AI agents help employees compare plans, understand policies, and make the most of their benefits year-round, while taking on the administrative work that previously made those programs costly and complex to run.
More than 3,000 employers and 22 million workers rely on the Workday Core Benefits module to administer, enroll in, and access their benefits. That scale makes Workday one of the largest employee benefits platforms, and gives it a rich data foundation for agentic AI. All that usage generates billions of rows of data, including benefit plan details, eligibility rules, and election decisions, that power machine learning, benchmarking, and the guardrails agents depend on.
That foundation is what makes our vision possible: AI agents that guide every employee to the right benefits decisions and handle the administrative work behind them.
Without Workday, employers are often stuck with a benefits ecosystem that creates too much cost and complexity for them and their employees. Many enterprises are still stitching together an HR system of record, a benefits administration system, an employee enrollment system, and an employee engagement system, alongside a benefits website and countless offline reports.
Most of these systems are unfit for the agentic AI era: they lack the architecture enterprise agents need to operate openly and safely, and they drive up support costs—money that could go toward better benefits for employees.
Today, that changes.
That foundation is what makes our vision possible: AI agents that guide every employee to the right benefits decisions and handle the administrative work behind them.
Early adopter customers are already seeing results from the new Workday Total Benefits Solution: they report a 75% reduction in the time spent onboarding a new provider and a 50% reduction in the time required to configure benefit plans.
“With Workday Wellness, we’ve reduced friction and created a more seamless, responsive experience that grows with our workforce,” said The Aspen Group.
We’ve brought the best technology and providers together in a single solution. Workday provides the agentic platform that automates administration and delivers intelligent experiences for employees. Provider partners bring world-class benefits to employees, with connected experiences across Workday and their own systems. Services partners take on additional administration, such as call centers, helping companies balance cost and quality. And it all runs on Workday.
Over 35 leading benefit providers have joined the ecosystem, including Empower, Wex, United Healthcare, SmithRX, Maven, and Lyra. We are also partnering with Strada and Benefit Harbor to help customers choose the best path between in-house benefits delivery and co-sourced models for additional benefit services.
That kind of efficiency is a game changer. Benefits leaders have long been locked into a rigid cycle of preparation ahead of each enrollment period, weighed down by slow vendor onboarding, costly and complex integrations, and manual plan configurations, so much so that many customers outsource benefits administration entirely. By removing those technical barriers, Workday gives them the flexibility and agility to add new providers and adapt their programs whenever they need to.
"A true one-stop shop for employees is the holy grail we've been chasing for years,” said Tanner Brunsdale, director of benefits and mobility at Lyft. “Workday is already where our people go, and what excites me most about Workday Wellness is where the AI is headed, meeting people before they even ask. That's real, proactive care."
“Workday is already where our people go, and what excites me most about Workday Wellness is where the AI is headed, meeting people before they even ask. That's real, proactive care."
Tanner Brunsdale
director of benefits and mobility, Lyft
Workday is the single AI platform for HR, finance, and IT. We’ve brought that same platform approach across each step of Workday Total Benefits, so benefit providers, admins, employees, and business leaders can work together seamlessly.
Benefit providers can pre-connect to Workday's open architecture to support customers at infinite scale, with capabilities including employee data exchange, automated benefit plan setup, employee education, absence administration, and more.
IT and admins can use agents to activate and adopt Workday features within their environment, making benefits IT administration simple.
Employees can rely on Benefits Guidance through our Self-Service Agent to compare plans, understand policies, and make the most of their benefits year-round.
Benefits leaders can access AI-powered summaries of employee sentiment, surface areas worth investigating, and connect with the right providers to meet their employees' needs.
Employees can rely on Benefits Guidance through our Self-Service Agent to compare plans, understand policies, and make the most of their benefits year-round.
With the foundation in place and scaling, we're looking ahead to 2027, when we'll expand what Workday Total Benefits can do. The focus: AI agents that anticipate, act, and advise across the entire benefits lifecycle.
Select highlights from our 2027 roadmap include:
Benefit Purchasing Intelligence helps HR teams advise and act on the complexities of benefit strategy and spend. Rather than simply providing a dashboard or a static report, it gives HR leaders the ability to ask an agent questions about their benefits data and get key insights. AI highlights how employee sentiment, enrollment, costs, and demographic data intersect in real time for better program design.
Workday Marketplace for Benefits empowers employers to better understand which providers are connected to Workday Wellness and how their solutions can drive measurable results for employee well-being.
Benefits Guidance for Self-Service Agent increases engagement by providing employees with proactive, personalized recaps of what benefits they’ve used and what else they can optimize. It’s connected to provider systems to help employees retrieve information, activate their accounts, and use available benefits.
Are you ready to transform benefits with AI? Join us at Workday Rising to see Workday Total Benefits in action.
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