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Workday AI Innovations Making a Splash for Your Organization

 

01.30.2025 | Technical Articles

 

Is your artificial intelligence investment paying off yet? According to an EY survey, more organizations are seeing an increased return on AI investment, especially when they’re willing to allocate 5% of their total budgets on those assets. In fact, half of senior leaders in the survey said they planned on earmarking 25% or more of their total budget for AI in the coming year.

It’s a clear sign that competitive enterprises will be those that are willing to explore new uses of AI and harness the power of platforms that are AI-forward. In fact, a global research report published by Workday, Inc. asserts that “AI will be a catalyst for a skills revolution where uniquely human capabilities like empathy and ethical decision-making become the most valuable assets at work.”

During Workday Rising 2024, the enterprise cloud application provider affirmed its commitment to offering customers AI-powered tools at every turn. They’ve even highlighted new AI capabilities and partnerships since then.

Here’s what you need to know about Workday AI Innovations like:

Illuminate

Workday AI Agents

Workday AI Gateway

HiredScore AI for Talent Mobility  

Illuminate

Let’s start with Illuminate. This is the centerpiece of the Workday AI strategy. Illuminate uses the over 800 billion business transactions annually run on their modules as the foundation for turning data and contextual information into decision-making insights and next-gen automation.

Beyond streamlining workflows and maximizing productivity, Illuminate employs a large language model (LLM) to understand the “how” and “why” behind HR and financial processes. This deep learning allows the AI platform to offer real-time assistance that can identify manual tasks to automate, reduce inefficiencies and friction, and empower people to dive into more creative and meaningful human work. The hope is that these Workday AI innovations can facilitate human connections

What does that look like in practice?

  • Accelerating tasks with generative AI: With a wealth of data at its disposal, Illuminate has learned how to generate content and summarize information in a flash. Job descriptions, candidate synopses, routine messages, boilerplate contracts, HR administrative updates, and more can be produced in a fraction of the time.
  • Offering real-time guidance and pointers: At times, users may be unaware of what can be automated or streamlined until informed. Illuminate includes Workday Assistant, which provides in-the-moment assistance on complex HR and finance tasks. Not unlike Microsoft Copilot, this feature can give tips on best practices and untangle complex processes so people can focus on strategic tasks.
     
  • Orchestrating AI across platforms: Since many intricate HR and finance processes are made of chains of routine tasks, organizations don’t necessarily need direct human involvement to complete them. Instead, Illuminate offers AI orchestration, which can oversee AI agents (more on that below) to handle specific tasks in the end-to-end processes, operating with and on behalf of your end users.
  • Generating AI-powered content summaries: Within the Workday Peakon Employee Voice product, users are now able to gain quick insights from employee feedback through artificial intelligence. Illuminate can generate content summaries of the key themes and emerging issues from vast volumes of employee concerns, helping leaders to make informed decisions before burnout or other issues come to a head.

Workday AI Agents

There has been a growing buzz around AI agents, and Workday is on the forefront of adopters of this exciting technology. For those who haven’t been exposed to these intelligent systems yet, AI agents are programs designed to carry out a specific task autonomously. More than just completing tasks, these AI-powered tools can learn to acquire relevant knowledge to improve performance over time.

The current roster of Workday AI agents is composed of four essential programs (with more on the way):

  • Recruiter Agent: This AI agent is intended to streamline hiring tasks and reimagine hiring acquisition. This includes proactively sourcing candidates, creating job descriptions, recommending talent in your database for open roles, and even making the initial outreach. With the ability to learn, your entire team will get better at hiring as time goes on.
  • Expenses Agent: Maintaining expense reports is a time-consuming process, and companies around the globe spend as much as 3,000 hours each year correcting errors. The Expenses Agent not only transforms the creation, submission, and approval of reports into a totally virtual process, but can even send automated reminders when company purchases are made.
  • Succession Agent: Not enough organizations have the time or processes to implement effective succession planning. With this AI agent, organizations can offload most of the heavy lifting. Succession Agent can identify and develop future leaders and create reminders to update the succession plan, keeping organizations prepared for expected or unexpected departures.
  • Workday Optimize: This specific AI agent is hyper-focused on identifying areas of dysfunction. Workday Optimize seeks out bottlenecks, blind spots, inefficiencies, and deviations from best practices to point your organization in the right direction. That could be employee onboarding, time tracking, budget management, or any other HR or finance process.

HiredScore AI for Talent Mobility

What about growing internal candidates through artificial intelligence? Workday’s acquisition of HiredScore early in 2024 elevated the capabilities of HCM to cultivate and develop in-house leaders.

The key advantage is AI-powered talent orchestration. HiredScore AI for Talent Mobility uses internal data to personalize the growth opportunities of candidates based on their experience and interests as well as the business’s needs. Leaders and employees themselves are given real-time notifications and alerts, career guides, and tailored communications.

The initial results are promising. Organizations using the HiredScore AI for Talent Mobility have shown to experience the following:

  • A 140% increase in higher-quality internal applications vs external applicants
  • 19% increase in internal employees hired or in process
  • 5% improvement of retention

All in all, employees receive the career support they want and leadership gets the help they need to proactively cultivate their workforce.

Workday AI Gateway

For those organizations that want to develop their own artificial intelligence tools, Workday AI Gateway can open the door to exciting new innovations. Though this feature was released last year, more companies have had a chance to experiment with this addition to Workday Extend.

In addition to allowing companies with Workday Extend talent to customize their own AI capabilities within the Workday platform, new AI services are being made available through the Workday AI Marketplace. These curated tools are built to address challenges and demands across HR, finance, planning, and specific industry needs.

With that in mind, it’s important for your customized Workday AI use cases to focus on tasks that are best suited for machines while leaving humans to handle tasks where their skills (see the following) are irreplaceable:

Evisort

Unless you have a cadre of legal, accounting, or procurement experts at your disposal, it can feel like your organization is at the mercy of those crafting complex legal and business documents. Honestly, even experienced professionals can get lost in opaque language. The recent acquisition of Evisort by Workday allows users of their unified HR and finance platform to extract actionable business insights faster and more accurately than before.

Evisort is elevating data extraction and automation across the enterprise suite. Accounting teams can use this tool to quickly digest revenue contracts, supplier invoices, and asset agreements to navigate the most beneficial terms. Procurement teams can use Evisort to enhance their supplier contract negotiations and manage contract risks.

Better still, Evisort can help employees across your organization to quickly obtain accessible and comprehensible answers to questions about HR and finance policies. In general, this AI document solution integrates perfectly with the expanding AI features already under the Workday banner.

Staying Current with Workday AI Innovations

As organizations are trying to uncover low-hanging fruit, Workday is basically providing organizations with a massive fruit bowl right within reach. With their recently announced Workday AI Advisory Board, Workday shows their eagerness to push boundaries while learning about topics like these:

  • The impact of AI on work
  • Workforce readiness and changes
  • Responsible AI
  • Technology-powered shifts in society

Workday’s willingness to think of the implications and repercussions of this technology not only increases their ability for ethical implementation, but to also provides the capabilities that workers and business leaders truly need.

These and other AI innovations have the potential to save customers time, money, and effort that can maximize AI investments in a relatively short period of time. All leaders need to do is connect with the right Workday implementation partner

Are you ready to unlock the power of Workday AI solutions? Agilysis can help you integrate artificial intelligence into your HR and finance functions.

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