At its April 2025 Innovation Summit last week, Workday shared its 20th birthday with a large group of industry analysts. At the event, Workday introduced two new top executives, Chief Commercial Officer Rob Enslin and President of Product and Technology Gerrit Kazmaier. Together with Co-Founder and Executive Chair Aneel Bhusri, CEO Carl Eschenbach, and a bevy of other leaders, Workday detailed its plans to move beyond generative AI to a comprehensive AI strategy focused on integrating agentic AI deeply into its HCM and Financials platform.
Moving Beyond GenAI to Agentic AI
Workday is positioning agentic AI as the future of AI for enterprise applications. According to Bhusri, “GenAI is a head fake. Agentic AI is it.” Rather than focusing on content generation, Workday is prioritizing agentic AI agents that reason, plan, and act autonomously within its platform.
Key tenets in Workday’s agentic AI strategy include that agents are:
- Embedded within Workday’s secure, compliant platform.
- Role-based to form a key component of the digital workforce.
- Able to support multistep business processes and decisions such as audits, payroll, performance reviews, financial reporting, contract negotiation, and other HCM and financial processes.
- Designed to deliver measurable productivity gains, especially in audit, compliance, and analytics.
Embedded AI for Measurable Business Value
Workday’s Illuminate AI engine powers Workday Assistant, a central AI companion that runs across the platform for conversational search, contextual guidance, and workflow simplification.
Workday focuses on agent development for tasks requiring deep IP, access to the right data, and broad applicability across customers. Agents are designed to deliver a measurable increase in productivity and improve business results, with an 18–24-month payback in terms of TCO.
Workday’s AI-powered application strategy includes:
- Accelerate features automate repetitive tasks like receipt scanning, invoice processing, time anomalies, and learning recommendations.
- Assist capabilities deliver contextual support across tools where users “live,” such as Slack, Teams, and on mobile devices. This is particularly useful for underserved frontline workers who don’t have an employee desktop.
- Transform capabilities redesign business processes for breakthrough productivity and compliance, and insight-to-action benefits.
Workday has embedded AI directly into the user experience, so people can use these capabilities in their regular workflow to execute tasks, and easily switch between applications and agents. Human-in-the-loop controls help ensure transparency and trust. Admins can create and curate the user experience with tools to shape the user experience.
In addition to horizontal use cases, Workday is also developing industry-specific agents and applications, such as time kiosks for frontline workers, subscription billing in tech/media, and contract lifecycle automation for legal/finance. Global localization is another critical pillar, especially in underserved areas like the federal government, education, and midmarket businesses.
Amplifying AI Value Through Workday’s Extend Partner Ecosystem
Workday’s expanding partner ecosystem is pivotal to scaling its AI vision. With over 1,100 partners (up from 200 two years ago), Workday’s Extend platform enables partners and customers to build native or interfaced agentic applications tailored to industry, regional, or functional needs.
Partners and customers can build AI applications that run natively on Workday’s platform, or register applications that interface with Workday but run natively on a separate platform.
Top selling points for partners to build on Workday’s platform include:
- A unified data model across HCM and Financials.
- High-quality data sets and large transaction volumes—over 1 trillion in total transactions have been processed through Workday’s platform.
- A Consistent development and deployment experience.
- “Clear Skies” guidance for partner alignment and support.
- Comprehensive API coverage.
Key programs fueling this ecosystem include:
- Global Payroll Connect connects local payroll vendors worldwide.
- AI Agent Factory enables internal and third-party agent creation.
- Workday Extend supports localized and vertical-specific use cases.
Workday says it’s had more partner demand than expected in the 10 months since launching this platform. About 60 applications and agents are already in the marketplace; 82 partners are building on the platform; and 100 are currently onboarding.
Leveraging AI for Growth in the Medium Business Segment
Workday has identified medium-sized businesses—which it defines as organizations with 500 to 3,500 employees—as a strategic growth market. Workday is now treating the medium business segment as a distinct and emerging opportunity. The vendor established Workday Go as its umbrella brand for the medium business segment, and has created dedicated sales and go-to-market teams; packaged, prescriptive solutions for faster deployment, localized offerings for different geographies, and partner-led expansion initiatives for this market.
Workday views AI and agentic innovation as differentiators in the mid-market. As discussed above, it’s embedding agentic AI directly into its platform, including in its mid-market packages, which should help simplify the user experience and improve outcomes. For instance:
- Tools like Workday Assistant, Guidance, and Biz Process Optimization Agent help users and admins automate common processes and optimize configurations with less effort.
- Pretrained Role-Based Agents deliver contextual guidance and can autonomously manage workflows—e.g., performance reviews, payroll adjustments, contract redlining—with human-in-the-loop oversight.
- A focus on delivering measurable business value from AI agents (e.g., 50%-plus productivity gains or 95% compliance coverage), with ROI targets of 18–24 months.
Perspective
Workday is betting big on agentic AI as a transformative shift, comparing it to the early days of the internet. The emphasis on measurable value, customer trust, and platform extensibility reflects its understanding of what matters to business leaders.
Workday’s 2025 Innovation Summit reinforced that the company is not simply layering AI onto its existing offerings—it is re-architecting its platform around agentic intelligence to drive tangible business outcomes. This shift from generic GenAI to purpose-built, embedded AI agents reflects Workday’s pragmatic and differentiated approach that prioritizes enterprise-grade security, contextual relevance, and measurable ROI.
Workday’s vision is ambitious, but grounded. By focusing on role-based agents that assist and eventually act autonomously, Workday is building toward a future where AI can handle core business tasks, not just assist with content or queries. Its commitment to human-in-the-loop governance, trust, and transparency is also critical when many organizations are still unsure how to safely scale AI.
Workday’s strategy to leverage its prescriptive Launch packages, embedded AI agents, and growing partner network to remove friction for medium businesses that need enterprise-class functionality without the enterprise-level complexity should also help fuel its midmarket growth ambitions. The big question here is execution. Medium businesses often prioritize ease of use, cost-efficiency, and fast time-to-value, and Workday will need to prove it can deliver on all three fronts. Pricing clarity, implementation speed, and partner readiness will be critical to winning in this segment.
Still, with a unified data model, embedded AI infrastructure, and an expanding ecosystem, Workday has all the building blocks to lead in the next phase of enterprise and mid-market transformation. If it can scale its agentic AI strategy as intended—and clearly demonstrate value across diverse industries and company sizes—it may redefine what intelligent enterprise software looks like for the next decade.
© SMB Group, 2025