Workday Makes A Play To Manage Your AI Agents

As AI Agents proliferate through our companies, Workday wants to make your life easier: the Workday Agent System of Record. This new toolset lets companies register, manage, provision, control, and train AI agents throughout the enterprise. It’s like a workforce management system for our “digital employees.”

Consider how the landscape is changing. Companies are buying and building hundreds of specialized AI agents (Galileo™, Paradox, Copilot, and others) and we need a way to manage them. Which agents access which sources of data? Who in the company is provisioned to use which agent? How do we secure or provision agents as new employees join or move? And how do we monitor the training, policies, and security of these intelligent things?

Workday, as the financial and HR system of record for 10,500 companies, plans to make this easy. And rather than treat agents as partner applications, the company is launching a system that registers these tools, helps you train the agents, lets you deactivate an agent, and a framework for integrating these agents into the Workday Assistant.

An AI Agent Governance Platform

This new offering falls into the category many call “AI Governance Platforms” but it goes much further. Vendors like Credo.ai, Holistic.ai, Anch.ai, and others have been pioneering this space, helping IT departments get their arms around all the AI systems in the company. Workday’s offering goes further, letting you define each agent’s skills (data sources and privileges) and create security groups and enablement rules.

And as vendors build more functional agents throughout the business ecosystem (we’re going to have hundreds of AI agents floating around our companies), Workday also gives customers the ability to integrate these agents into the Workday Assistant.

Imagine you purchase an agent like Galileo (HR Assistant) or Paradox (Automated recruiter). Rather than ask internal employees to log into two different user experiences, the vendors have the option to integrate its internal conversations into Workday Assistant. This means that over time, if things go well, the Workday Assistant itself becomes extensible to talk with many vendor solutions.

And there’s more. The integration between the Workday Assistant and an Agent is now an application in itself, enabled by Workday Extend.

This means Workday has essentially launched an “Assistant Studio” similar to Microsoft’s Copilot Studio and ServiceNow Studio. I’m not sure this is fully built out yet, but you can see from the demos that Workday is going to let customers and application developers take off-the-shelf agents and add customer-specific code to make them fit into your own company’s workflows.

The end result is a new opportunity for application developers and customer IT staff: you can find the best agent in the market for your needs and then “customize it” to fit it into your company.

Implications Of This Announcement: Workday Grows Its Value in Enterprise AI

As I discuss in my latest podcast on Enterprise AI, Workday faces a threatening world ahead. What if a vendor builds a multi-functional agent that does everything from sourcing to candidate support, interviewing, background checking, offer generation, and onboarding. And what if that Agent has its own applicant tracking system and assessment built in. (Paradox, Eightfold, Seekout, and Maki People are moving in this direction.) Could this AI-centric agent possibly replace or obviate the need for Workday Recruiting?

Well now that Workday has an advanced Agent Management System (my phrase), customers are less likely to play the “replacement game” and rather look at Workday as the management platform for future innovation. And since companies have already invested millions in the Workday infrastructure, this protects the Workday value and lets Workday participate in future “agent mania” regardless of which agents win.

On the other hand, as I discuss in the podcast, Workday itself (as with Oracle, SAP, and every other HCM) needs to build its own AI agents too (which they are). So now customers can do a bakeoff between the Workday Agent and a third party one without worrying that the external product may not be easy to manage.

Right now the biggest blocker to AI adoption I see is IT departments worrying about data leakage, security breaches, and mis-behaving agents that touch corporate data. Workday’s tool set will help them validate and secure these new applications as they get smarter, richer, and more functional by the day.

The end result is goodness for all. Workday customers get better management tools; vendors get a cleaner way to sell into Workday accounts, and Workday gets to grow and leverage innovation regardless of the source.

Welcome To Your Digital Workforce

While many call agents “Digital Twins” or “Digital Workers,” I think they’re more like highly programmable robots. Not only can AI agents analyze, manage, and generate data like never before, we can “teach them” and “program them” to carry out our most vital business processes.

Now that tools like the Workday Agent System of Record (not my favorite name) are here, we can manage this growing plethora of AI platforms which bring new levels of scale, power, and integration to our companies.

Additional Information

The Rise of the Superworker: Delivering On The Promise Of AI

Digital Twins, Digital Employees, And Agents Everywhere

AI in HR: Certificate Program in The Josh Bersin Academy

Galileo™ Professional, The Essential AI Assistant for Everything HR