Workday works on new Agent System

Workday is developing a centralised system for managing AI agents across organisations, providing tools for governance, optimisation, and integration of both Workday and third-party AI agents.

The new Workday Agent System of Record will be a platform that will provide tools to govern, manage, and optimise digital workforces. As the number and complexity of AI agents grow, organisations face a new set of challenges: managing their deployment, ensuring their security and compliance, optimising their impact, and managing costs.

Without a centralised approach, businesses risk fragmented operations, increased security risk, and difficulty measuring the true value of their AI investments. 

Workday says that Agent System of Record will provide an efficient, secure way to onboard new AI agents, define their roles and responsibilities, track their impact, budget and forecast their costs, support compliance, and foster continuous improvement. By providing a single system for managing AI agents being used across a company’s workforce, Workday gives IT and business leaders transparency and control over the impact of AI agents on work.

Agent System of Record is expected to become available later this year (2025).

“The workforce of the future will include both humans and AI agents, and businesses that don’t learn to manage this incredibly complex reality will fall quickly behind,” says Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and executive chair of Workday.

“We believe no company in the world is better positioned than Workday to usher in this new era of workforce management in a trusted, ethical way. Our deep understanding of human skills and roles naturally extends to managing digital labour. The future is here, and just like with the transition to the cloud, we’re ready to help our customers get there first.”

Carl Eschenbach, CEO of Workday, says: “At Workday, we believe that humans and agents should peacefully coexist in a way that amplifies human performance. As the system of record for more than 10,500 organisations around the world, there is no one better than Workday to manage every part of the workforce – employees, contingent workers, and agents – on our trusted platform.”

Unlock the full potential of AI agents

With the Agent System of Record, Workday says organisations can use the best AI agents for their needs – whether they’re from Workday, Workday customers, or partners – while maintaining centralised control, governance, and visibility.  

Key benefits include: 

• Centralised management: Manage all AI agents within a single system to gain transparency into their impact and effectiveness.
• Streamlined agent onboarding: Quickly onboard new agents with defined roles, skills, and secure access to relevant data, accelerating time to value.
• Managing and optimising costs: Budget, forecast, and optimise the ROI of AI agents to ensure efficiency and effectiveness in delivering business outcomes.
• Support secure and compliant deployment: Deploy agents with confidence, leveraging automated configuration, access controls, and policy enforcement to mitigate risk.
• Real-time operational visibility: Monitor agent activity, enforce policies, and track costs in real time to optimise performance and ROI. Maintain agent oversight with real-time identity verification, agent orchestration, and financial cost monitoring for optimal performance.

New role-based agents transform entire business processes

Workday’s role-based AI agents, currently in development and launching later this year, will enable customers to deploy and manage AI agents through the Agent System of Record. While other agents in the market today are task-based and follow specific step-by-step instructions, Workday’s role-based agents contain a configurable set of skills that give them more autonomy and the ability to support people more fully in their roles.

The agents can perform hundreds of individual tasks. Workday’s previously announced role-based agents include Recruiting, Talent Mobility, Succession, and Optimise Agents.

New Workday agents include:

• Contracts agent: Continuously analyses contracts across the enterprise, surfaces obligations and opportunities buried in unstructured data, and drives business actions to capture value and mitigate risk.
• Payroll agent: Identifies and updates invalid payroll data. Automates audit workflows, surfaces insights, and recommends fixes. Monitors compliance and delivers system updates.
• Financial auditing agent: Increases efficiency and mitigates risk during the audit experience by connecting complex business documents to monitor transactions, reconcile balances, and review internal controls. Allows audit firms to develop apps that connect directly to their Workday customers.
• Policy agent: Continuously reads a company’s latest corporate policy details, then proactively sends that information to employees and managers wherever they are asking questions or doing work. Delivers a simplified self-service user experience, more compliant transactions, and deflection of tactical case volume, allowing the HR help desk to focus on more complex cases.

Discover and deploy industry-leading AI agents through workday marketplace

AI Agents from Workday and Workday partners are featured on Workday Marketplace. In the future, customers and partners will be able to augment, customise, and complement AI agents that integrate seamlessly with Workday through Workday’s developer platform, Workday Extend. 

Support for the Workday Agent System of Record

Adam Evans, EVP and GM of Salesforce AI, says: “More and more business leaders are deploying agents in their organisations and considering how digital labour can help them scale. Workday is making it easy to incorporate and manage AI agents right alongside human workforces to augment employee bases with always-on digital labour.

“Last year, Salesforce and Workday partnered to develop agents for employee service use cases, and soon, Agentforce agents will be available on the Workday Marketplace to even more HR and finance professionals who use Workday to manage their human – and now agentic – workforces. We look forward to continuing to innovate together and empowering more businesses with digital labour.”

Swami Sivasubramanian, VP of data and AI of AWS, says: “AWS is powering the future of AI agent development through Amazon Bedrock’s comprehensive foundation model ecosystem and enterprise-grade development framework.

“With Workday’s Agent System of Record, organisations will be much better positioned to ethically manage all these agents. We’re excited to collaborate with Workday to reshape the future of work through agentic AI. Together, we’ll empower organisations to unlock exponential value while maintaining our shared commitment to security and responsible AI.”

R “Ray” Wang, CEO and principal analyst of Constellation Research, says: “The rise of AI agents in the enterprise has created an urgent need for a centralised system of record to manage and govern this increasingly complex landscape.

“Most of the executives we’ve spoken with seek solutions that provide the tools they need to harness the power of AI while maintaining security, compliance, and control. Digital workforce management capabilities will be a significant step forward for the industry.”

Winston Weinberg, CEO and co-founder of Harvey, says: “The Workday Agent System of Record is a game-changer for enterprise AI adoption. By centrally managing agents and ensuring they adhere to the same strict access controls and compliance standards as human employees, Workday is building the foundation for a truly trusted and secure AI-powered workforce. This is paramount for widespread enterprise adoption.”

Matt Castonguay, CFO of Team Car Care, says: “At Team Car Care, we’ve already experienced firsthand the power of Workday’s AI capabilities, which are making a real impact on our bottom line. That’s why we’re so excited about the Workday Agent System of Record. As we continue to explore the potential of AI, having a comprehensive platform like this will be critical.” 

Steve Chase, vice chair of AI and digital innovation of KPMG, says: “Digital colleagues, or AI agents, will become an increasingly common addition to the workforce, and Workday’s Agent System of Record is well positioned to help organisations meet the moment of monumental change. We’re thrilled to collaborate with Workday to help our shared clients manage the new digital workforce with confidence just as they do full-time employees and contractors.”