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Workday expands agentic AI automation for HR teams
Workday introduced AI agents for HR and finance workflows and previewed tools for workforce planning as enterprises look to automate administrative work.
The idea of autonomous HR is gradually evolving into a real-life possibility. CIOs and HR tech buyers seem primed for it -- if it proves to work.
Today, Workday released some feature bundles and integrations, and previewed others scheduled for early 2027, at its Workday Rising user conference in Austin, Texas. Highlights included the following:
- Autopilot Agents that work continuously in the background to manage hiring, payroll and accounting processes.
- The headless Trusted Agent Platform that acts as a harness for Workday and other companies' AI agents doing HR work.
- Decision Intelligence, a finance and HR AI analyst that weighs workforce versus finance tradeoffs to aid decision-makers.
Another feature available in beta to Workday HCM (Human Capital Management) users is Work Intelligence, which takes a page from gig-economy task-based algorithms that define pay. Work Intelligence breaks a customer's HR-defined roles into tasks and uses agentic AI to plan positions based on estimated task loads they can handle.
In a demo, Workday showed how Work Intelligence analyzed a company's planned hiring of 50 employees. It broke down each job into tasks for the analysis and determined that the company only needed 42 employees to meet its business needs.
Workday's customer data stores are the engine driving the company's product line expansion this year -- technology that's moving faster than at any time in the company's history, said Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and CEO. It adds the business context needed for AI tools to be effective.
"It's that context that makes AI in the enterprise so powerful," Bhusri said. "It gives us the foundation to do things that help companies make better decisions, move faster and get real work done but only works if you have the right guardrails."
Users are likely ready
Other tech vendors, such as Salesforce, have rolled out similarly ambitious platforms that integrate enterprise data, application stacks and agentic AI reasoning engines.
As a technology, Agentic AI promises to help remove data silos and drive new enterprise efficiency through data sharing and analysis. But it has been widely reported that Salesforce has found slow uptake of its Agentforce platform for several reasons, including customer issues with data readiness, IT budget gaps and the inability to move agentic AI from proof-of-concept to production.
HR systems are typically quite mature, difficult to use and hidebound in their feature sets, said Josh Bersin, founder and CEO of the Josh Bersin Co., an independent research firm.
HR business partners (HRBPs) using these technologies are ready for a big upgrade because their jobs are mired in busywork, chasing down data -- such as on job turnover -- for other business leaders, who don't have the tools to do it themselves, Bersin noted. Agentic AI might bring the automations that users have been dreaming of, he added.
"People are really sick of these old systems -- Workday, SAP, Oracle," Bersin said. "Anything that makes [them] easier to use, they're going to try. They're going to push back on the price, but they have been ridiculously hard to use…not only does AI make it do more work, but it papers over the complexities nobody liked in the first place."
The biggest problems HR tech vendors need to solve before their customers can fully adopt AI, Bersin said, are agent governance and orchestration. Workday's upcoming releases attempt to address that.
Jobs, they are a-changin'
At first glance, AI tools enabling task-based job analysis and HR realignment around them seem like they would automate people out of jobs. Theoretically, HRBPs could run such analyses on themselves and find they're no longer needed at their companies because AI could automate much of the administrative work they do.
Bersin said he doesn't see that as a problem anytime soon. HRBPs would prefer to do higher-level tasks, such as staffing models pegged to seasonal factors that will drive future needs, but they don't have the capacity.
"Most of the HR people I meet who are at least five-ten years into their careers are flooded with so much administrative stuff they don't get to do the strategic stuff," Bersin said. "They're so bogged down."
A new HR job that Bersin sees potentially arising in the coming AI-automated-HR era is agent management, because agents aren't static, set-it-and-forget-it entities. They will always need people to retrain AI hiring agents as company objectives, policies, capacities and other business needs change over time, he said.
Don Fluckinger is a seasoned B2B technology journalist with over 30 years of experience specializing in enterprise IT, digital experience and content management. As a senior news writer at Informa TechTarget, he delivers award-winning analysis that helps IT and business leaders navigate complex technologies to enhance customer and employee experiences. Got a tip? Email him.
