The new work day is AI-powered, human-centric, and future-ready, declared Carl Eschenbach, CEO of Workday. At his Workday Rising opening keynote, he celebrated the company’s 20^th anniversary of helping integrate the CFO, CHRO, and CIO offices.

I attended the event and met with several of Workday’s executives, each giving their own lens on the future of work. To excel in the genAI era, organizations will need to

• Drive change management that develops trust and accelerates AI adoption.
• Integrate AI agents that do more than improve productivity – they deliver ROI and drive digital transformation.
• Enable configuring AI agents with data wherever it exists in the enterprise, using low-code development tools.

Below is how three Workday executives explained these objectives at the conference that drew over 30,000 attendees.

Elevate change management to accelerate AI adoption

Every organization must have a change management plan adapted to its AI strategy.

One focus area must be to unlock tribal knowledge and guide subject matter experts in sharing information with AI agents. Experts must then validate the agents’ results and provide feedback on areas for improvement.  

An equally tall challenge is developing AI literacy skills and gaining the employees’ trust to experiment with AI. While organizations have early adopters, transforming to and agentic future of work requires employees to adapt to new roles.

“We work with our learning and development teams to create learning paths, develop AI champions in every department, and give employees the skills to benchmark and use these tools effectively,” says Rani Johnson, CIO of Workday. “Our goal is to ensure the entire organization is ready for AI by building fluency and comfort with these new tools. This helps foster an AI-first mindset, allowing our teams to identify the real opportunities for AI in their daily work and ultimately become more efficient.

Rani partners with Chris Ernst, Workday’s chief learning officer, on programs to increase AI learning and adoption across their organization. Among their results, Workday’s highest AI adopters experience several key benefits:

• Salespeople are spending an hour more per week with customers.
• Employees are spending two hours more a week collaborating with their teammates.
• High AI adopters are 13% more likely to see a career path at Workday.

CIOs should partner with the CHRO on their organization’s AI change management efforts. Beyond trust and adoption, achieving an AI mindset and longer-term business benefits will require an agile, iterative approach to deploying, gaining adoption, and continually improving AI agents.

Beyond productivity: AI Agents that drive real operational benefits

Whenever I speak to experts on AI agents, I ask the same question. Tell me about the AI agents that do more than deliver productivity benefits. Peter Bailis, CTO of Workday, answered my question by providing these use cases for AI agents

• Read and extract knowledge from thousands of contracts and achieve a 65% reduction in contract execution time with Workday’s Contract Intelligent Agent, available now.
• Confidence in compliance with agents like Workday’s Payroll Agent (early adopter) and Financial Test Agent (2026).
• Close the books faster with Workday’s Financial Close Agent (2026).
• Improve the accuracy of performance reviews with Workday’s Performance Agent (2026).

Review Workday’s list of AI agents and learn more how they amplify talent, reduce costs, improve decisions, and mitigate risks.

A developer ecosystem to drive organizational benefits

Workday expanded its commitment to IT by announcing Workday Build and Workday Data Cloud at the conference. Their comprehensive development platform, Workday Build, includes tools such as Extend Apps (low-code development), Flowise Agents (AI-enabled workflows), and Data Cloud (zero-copy access to data in Databricks, Salesforce, and Snowflake). Workday Build also includes a partner ecosystem and development community.

I saw a demo of Flowise, which allows employees to use natural language to configure job-specific workflows. I went into the weeds to learn more about Extend Apps, how it works, and who is using the tool.

“The Extend toolset is pretty simple and almost like a LAMP stack with a way to build front-end pages, a logic layer, and a way to object model your backend components,” says Matthew Grippo, SVP of core software at Workday. “It’s pretty straightforward once a developer understands Workday’s security model, their organization’s business processes, and how the system is configured. We see many HR specialists jumping the fence because they know Workday really well, want to experiment  with coding, and were able to build some simple apps pretty quickly.”

Planning for the agentic AI future of work

Here’s my take. Automation and RPAs were boring. They take today’s process, scale it, and drive efficiencies, but they aren’t transformative. Many first wave of genAI tools are higher-level automations and improve productivity, but by themselves, they also aren’t transformative. Tools like copilots, assistants, and code generators can free people’s time, but they aren’t necessarily evolving operations. I also doubt these, by themselves, will be true digital transformation drivers.

As AI agents take on partnering roles and are “human-centric,” they can provide a lot more business value. These agents aim to help people do jobs they couldn’t do well before because of scale, knowledge, or complexity. Look for these agents to be the enablers of the future of work.