Workday aims to manage AI agents like employees

At its Workday Rising event in September, the company rolled out Illuminate, its next-gen agentic AI platform, along with four AI agents: Recruiter, Expenses, Succession, and Optimize. Recruiter is for sourcing candidates, recommending talent, and automating outreach and interview scheduling. Expenses creates, submits, and approves expense reports. Succession automates the succession planning process, prompting managers to create succession plans. It also recommends successors, and generates personalized development plans. Optimize identifies bottlenecks, inefficiencies and deviations from the company’s best practices.

Role with it

Workday has adopted an agentic AI strategy around what it dubs role-based AI agents. Most AI agents in the market today are task-based and follow specific step-by-step instructions. Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach believes task-based agents must evolve into role-based agents, which contain a configurable set of skills that give them more autonomy and the ability to better support humans in particular roles.

“The future of agents is when they become role-based,” he said in the same press conference. “These role-based agents will maybe start out with a skill, but over time they will have many skills. This is how we will truly unlock the power of AI.”