Workday rolls out tool to manage AI agents

Accounting and human capital solutions provider Workday, which already sells software to manage both people and money, is now marketing a product that helps organizations manage AI agents as well. 

Called the Workday Agent System of Record, it aims to help organizations manage their entire fleet of AI agents, from both Workday and third parties, in one place, letting businesses manage their deployment, ensure their security and compliance, optimize their impact, and control costs. That can help them avoid the risk of fragmented operations, increased security threats, and difficulty measuring the true value of AI investments.

The solution offers centralized management that provides transparency into the impact and effectiveness of all AI agents within a single system. This includes the ability to budget, forecast and optimize the ROI of AI agents. Users can onboard new agents by providing defined roles, skills and access to relevant data, and then deploy them with automated configuration, access controls and policy enforcement to mitigate risk. Users can then monitor agent activity, enforce policies and track costs in real time. The product also provides continuous agent oversight with real-time identity verification, agent orchestration and financial cost monitoring for optimal performance.

“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 quickly fall behind,” said 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 labor. The future is here, and just like with the transition to the cloud, we’re ready to help our customers get there first.”

Workday also announced the release of new role-based AI agents that can be deployed and managed through the new Agent System of Record. In contrast to text-based agents that follow only specific step-by-step instructions, Workday’s agents are able to perform “hundreds of individual tasks” through a configurable set of skills that give them more autonomy and the ability to more fully support people in their roles. Previous agents released by Workday include role-based agents for recruiting, talent mobility, succession and optimization. 

New releases include a contract agent that continuously analyzes contracts across the enterprise, finds obligations and opportunities buried in unstructured data, and drives business actions to capture value and mitigate risk. A new payroll agent identifies and updates invalid payroll data, automates audit workflows, surfaces insights, recommends fixes, monitors compliance and delivers system updates. A financial auditing agent aims to increase efficiency and mitigate risks during the audit experience by monitoring transactions, reconciling balances and reviewing internal controls. A new policy agent continuously reads a company’s latest corporate policy details, then sends that information to employees and managers wherever they are asking questions or doing work. This agent also delivers a self-service user experience, more compliant transactions, and deflection of tactical case volume, allowing the HR help desk to focus on more complex cases.

AI Agents from Workday and Workday partners will be featured in Workday Marketplace, where customers can discover and deploy agents that meet their business needs. In the future, customers and partners will also be able to augment, customize and complement AI agents that integrate with Workday through Workday’s developer platform, Workday Extend.

The Workday Agent System of Record and new role-based AI agents are currently in development and are expected to become available later this year.