What Is Workday Illuminate?

Today Workday introduced Workday Illuminate, the new brand name for Workday AI. While the name is not important, this new brand demonstrates a shift from AI “dazzlers” to AI “capabilities” within the entire Workday platform. In other words, Workday has now built an underlying AI infrastructure that can manifest solutions in hundreds of ways.

Under the covers Workday is running a 800 Billion parameter LLM optimized for the 70 million users’ HR and finance data within Workday. This means the Workday application can now start to surface intelligent features that bring intelligence across all the finance, HR, and operational elements of Workday.

In many ways it’s a highly advanced idea. (SAP is doing the same, incidentally.) Using new capabilities (AI Agents) Workday can now offer agents that identify budget overruns, search for metrics that are out of range, and tell managers that employees are logging too much overtime. This results in an actionable solution: hire more people, cut back hours, or redesign operations.

There are many valuable applications of this approach. The new Workday Intelligent Job Architecture agent (complex name I know) shows an HR manager when skills are needed and when jobs with common skills could be merged. It also shows people with these skills who may be in the “wrong job” or could benefit from a job change. (Kind of like a deterministic talent marketplace.)

The most interesting part of Illuminate immediately is the new, upgraded Workday Assistant. In a UI that looks a bit like Microsoft Copilot, the Assistant is now much smarter and can help a Workday user perform a task by asking questions. It guides you through the transaction, and along the way gives you information to help. It’s as easy to use as SAP Joule (not as built out yet) and ADP Assist, but today focuses primarily on Workday-internal functions (it isn’t an open Copilot yet).

Workday admits its UI needs help so these capabilities are exactly what’s needed. And new agents (Recruiter agent, Succession agent) are already in demo mode so you can already see where things are going. Workday is going to be “agent-enabled” and open to partners to build and integrate functions into the AI infrastructure.

I’ll fill you in on other announcements later this week, but so far all is good news and lots of excitement at Workday Rising this year.

Additional Information

AI Agents, The New Workforce We’re Not Quite Ready For (Agentic AI)