When you gather 10,500 organizations worldwide using Workday and 16,000 HR, finance, and IT professionals for a few days of knowledge sharing, you can learn key insights about leading talent management, guiding financial performance, and delivering AI-driven business value.

I came to Workday Rising with questions about where the CIO and CHRO partnership around AI opportunities and governance was taking world-class organizations. After getting a preview of Workday’s AI agents, I wanted to learn more about the data requirements, organizational benefits, and whether employees would easily adopt these capabilities.

I also wanted to get better insights into Workday’s technology platform, the announced user experience improvements, and how they develop AI models without compromising their enterprise customer’s financial and human resources data.

Three takeaways from Workday Rising 2024

I shared real-time insights and learnings on my Twitter and LinkedIn feeds, and here is a summary of my key takeaways.

1. The benefits of AI in HR go well beyond productivity improvements

How does a company of 14,000 employees sift through millions of job candidates to recruit top talent?

While HR departments have been using technology to review job applications for some time, the experience for candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters often gets a “needs improvement” rating or worse.

AI makes recruiting easier, especially for skills-based organizations where the individual as a whole person fits with the work that needs to be done within their organization both today and in the future. Workday unveiled Recruiter Agent, an AI agent for recruiters that proactively sources passive candidates, automates outreach, and recommends top talent for open roles.

A second Workday AI agent aids in succession planning, which helps leaders and managers identify potential successors from candidates beyond their direct reports and connections.

While both these agents can improve productivity, their greater benefit is how a better user experience can improve hiring and retention.

2. Develop no-code and low-code HR and finance applications

Developing HR applications that need to connect to employee, performance, and other sensitive data isn’t easy as it requires secured data connections into the HCM (human capital management) platform. Developing ERP workflow extensions has an added concern, as any changes to financial data should be completed in real time to avoid data synchronization issues.

Workday flips the script with Extend, their no-code and low-code developer experiences that tap into HCM and finance data and run on the Workday Cloud. Workday shared that 1,000 customers are building apps with Workday Extend, and 2,000 apps are in production.

Two example customer stories:

• St. Luke’s University Health Network developed My Opt-In Bonuses to help staff enroll in bonus programs without having to speak to a manager. They improved nurse retention rates by 50%, which they attribute to 74% of nurses using the app to enroll in bonus plans. In another example, it took them three days to develop and deploy a time-tracking app to 12,000 people.
• Global real estate enterprise Cushman & Wakefield’s Journal Line Reclassification application enables users to make corrections in the accounting process and revisit entries automatically.

3. Domain-specific AI models drive accuracy, reduce costs, and maintain privacy

Workday has an impressive dataset to train its 7,000+ AI models, including 70 million users on the platform and over 800 billion transactions per year. But that doesn’t mean enterprises should automatically trust Workday’s AI, especially given the sensitivity of data stored on the platform.

Executives shared four reasons why enterprises need AI from Workday. Among the reasons, they explained how they isolate customer data and create private and secure domain-specific models.

Shane Luke, VP of Workday AI, discussed how they leverage model adapters to isolate data between customers. Essentially, they start with foundation models and then use customer-specific model adapters to leverage proprietary data. They also implement prompt compression to optimize LLM computing costs without sacrificing accuracy.

AI Agents, domain-specific models, and Workday Assistant are all components of Illuminate,  Workday’s next-generation AI. They also demonstrated AI agent integrations with Salesforce Einstein and Slack.

AI agents, low/no-code HR and finance applications, and domain-specific AI models—CIOs, CHROs, and CFOs should review these potential benefits, especially when seeking benefits from AI beyond productivity drivers.