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Workday announces AI agents for HR & Finance plus Workday Build platform for custom AI solutions
Workday Rising – the San Francisco event where the company hopes to dazzle clients with its products – is now underway, and with it a bunch of announcements.
Top of the list, purpose-built AI agents designed to help workers in HR, finance and industry. But it also announced Workday Build, a development platform that will allow its partners and customers to create AI solutions.
“This is our new developer platform for customers, partners and developers,” said Mark Woollen, Workday GVP for Partner Innovation. “It has AI at the core, and all these new developer tools make it faster than ever, to innovate with Workday.”
He added: “Now this isn’t just another low code platform. It’s a complete offering, and it’s designed specifically with the intelligent enterprise in mind.”
Purpose-built Workday AI agents
Workday believes that its new AI agents could not only make current employees more productive but also improve their HR experiences.
“[An employee’s] questions are often complex, and processing times for HR departments are often long,” said Peter Bailis, Workday CTO. “With the new case agent that changes. It automatically reviews similar cases in HR, applies the right regional and compliance context, and it drafts a tailored response.”
Then there’s a performance review agent, which Bailis reckons avoids the pitfalls of bias and feelings covered from recent memory. “It draws on a full year of data across workday and other systems where work gets done, like Salesforce,” he said. “It gives management a 360, comprehensive, data-driven starting point.”
The agent can even draft the first review ready for a manager to edit rather than write from scratch. The result? “[It] can give you a performance-oriented culture that actually powers the business,” said Bailis.
In addition to this, Workday announced a “financial close” agent to reconcile accounts and flag anomalies.
“What these agents are doing, end to end, is they’re freeing teams from the repetitive, manual work and ultimately transforming how the work gets done, across the entire process of task as complex as performance reviews, all the way to financial close,” he added.
Workday Build
So those are AI agents that Workday has created. It’s also keen for organisations to join the likes of Target, Netflix and the NASDAQ to create custom apps for the Workday platform. Mark Woollen said that over 1,400 customers currently produce such apps.
“Think of Workday Build as the stage,” he explained. “It’s the lights, it’s the mic, it’s the scenery. It’s everything that you need as an actor, or in this case, as a developer, all the support you need so you can excel at your craft, amplify your creativity and basically empower you to build really amazing apps and put them in the hands of users that are in the Workday ecosystem.”
So what’s included? First up is Agent Builder. “This is a low-code tool that enables developers to design, deploy and manage AI agents directly within Workday,” said Woollen. “This is for anything from simple conversational experiences to complex workflows.”
Next up is “a new AI developer set of products and tooling that’s designed to help customers build apps and agents and orchestrations in the Workday platform, including a GenAI-powered developer copilot”, Woollen explained.
Another important component: Agent Gateway, which is there to connect AI agents with Workday’s agent system of record.
Availability of new AI agents and Workday Build
Workday calls its purpose-built AI agents “Illuminate Agents”, and says the new releases will be available in 2026.
In terms of Workday Build, the new Agent Builder “will be available to customers that have Workday Extend Professional in the first half of 2026” according to the press release.
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