At the heart of Workday's announcements is Illuminate, a powerful AI platform built on what the company calls "the world's largest and cleanest HR and finance dataset." Illuminate processes over 800 billion business transactions annually, leveraging data and contextual information to drive precise decision-making and personalised experiences.
Carl Eschenbach, CEO of Workday, said: "By placing tangible business value, responsible innovation, and user-centric design at the forefront, Workday Illuminate empowers businesses to harness AI's full potential to drive unprecedented productivity and move forever forward."
Illuminate aims to transform work in three key ways:
- Accelerating common tasks with generative AI: Expediting content creation and offering insights through anomaly detection, auto-filling, and document scanning.
- Delivering real-time AI assistance: The new Workday Assistant provides seamless guidance across HR and finance tasks.
- Transforming entire business processes: AI orchestration anticipates and streamlines common processes, providing users with a "team" of AI agents to manage complex, cross-platform tasks.
Building on the Illuminate platform, Workday unveiled four new AI-powered agents designed to streamline common business workflows:
- Recruiter Agent: Revolutionising talent acquisition by automating candidate sourcing and improving hiring quality.
- Expenses Agent: Offering near-touchless expense report creation and approval.
- Succession Agent: Transforming succession planning into a continuous AI-powered process.
- Workday Optimise: Streamlining business processes by identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
David Somers, Workday's Chief Product Officer, emphasised the significance of these developments, stating, "Workday Illuminate and our new AI agents are here to change the game, empowering companies to unlock exponential value across their entire organisation."
In addition to these new agents, Workday is also building integrated agent capabilities with partners including Salesforce and Microsoft to provide users with seamless assistance across the most-used enterprise platforms.
Workday also announced the launch of 12 new Industry Accelerators, developed in collaboration with its partner ecosystem. These accelerators aim to help customers rapidly modernise their HR and finance operations with industry-specific solutions.
Sophie Sharp, Senior Vice President of Global Industries and Value Management at Workday, explained, "Every industry has unique business challenges that require solutions designed specifically for them. Industry Accelerators help customers harness the full power of the Workday platform combined with industry-leading practices."
The new accelerators cover a wide range of sectors, including:
- Banking
- Healthcare (providers and payors)
- Higher Education
- Professional Services
- Retail and Hospitality
- Technology and Media
These offerings, developed in partnership with firms including Accenture, Deloitte, KPMG, and PwC, address sector-specific challenges such as improving academic recruitment for universities, optimising project management for professional services firms, and tackling staffing shortages in retail and hospitality.
The announcements at Workday Rising also highlighted the company's growing partner ecosystem. Recent initiatives include:
- Global Payroll Connect: A platform unifying global partner payroll solutions.
- Built on Workday program: Enabling partners to develop and market HR and finance apps via Workday Marketplace.
These developments allow for greater customisation and flexibility, as apps from the Workday Marketplace can be integrated into partner Industry Accelerator offerings.
