Workday unveils AI workforce management system to govern digital labour

Workday has announced the Workday Agent System of Record, a platform designed to help organisations manage their growing fleet of AI agents, regardless of origin. This new offering aims to provide a centralised solution for governing, managing, and optimising digital workforces, addressing the challenges organisations face as AI agent adoption accelerates.

With the increasing number and complexity of AI agents, organisations struggle with deployment, security, compliance, impact measurement, and cost management. Workday’s Agent System of Record seeks to alleviate these pain points by offering a single system to onboard, define roles, track impact, budget costs, support compliance, and drive continuous improvement for AI agents.

“The workforce of the future will include both humans and AI agents, and organisations that don’t learn to manage this incredibly complex reality will fall quickly behind,” said Aneel Bhusri, Co-Founder and Executive Chair at Workday. He emphasised Workday’s position to lead this new era of workforce management, leveraging its expertise in human skills and roles to extend to digital labour.

Carl Eschenbach, CEO for Workday, added, “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.”

Workday also introduced new role-based AI agents, deployable and manageable through the Agent System of Record. Unlike task-based agents, these agents possess a configurable set of “skills”, enabling greater autonomy and support for human roles. New agents include those for contracts, payroll, financial auditing, and policy management.

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Additionally, the Workday Marketplace will feature AI agents from Workday and its partners, simplifying discovery and deployment. Future plans include allowing users and partners to augment and customise agents via Workday Extend.

Leaders from Salesforce, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Constellation Research, Harvey, Team Car Care, and KPMG expressed support for the Workday Agent System of Record, highlighting its potential to transform enterprise AI adoption and workforce management. Salesforce will offer Agentforce agents on the Workday Marketplace. AWS will collaborate with Workday to develop AI agents using Amazon Bedrock.

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