Workday Announces New Agent System of Record, Role-Based AI Agents

AI platform for managing people and money, Workday, has recently announced the Workday Agent System of Record to help organizations manage their entire fleet of AI agents in a single place.

New solution to govern increasingly common agentic AI

This system, which manages AI agents from both Workday and third-party vendors, enables businesses to utilize agentic AI by providing essential tools for helping organizations govern, manage, and optimize their digital workforce.

Workday also announced new role-based AI agents, which will be easily deployed and managed through the Agent System of Record. Both the AI agents and Agent System of Record are in development and are expected to be available later this year.

“The workforce of the future will include both humans and AI agents, and businesses that don’t learn to manage this incredibly complex reality will quickly fall behind,” said Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and executive chair, Workday. “We believe no company in the world is better positioned than Workday to usher in this new era of workforce management in a trusted, ethical way. Our deep understanding of human skills and roles naturally extends to managing digital labor. The future is here, and just like with the transition to the cloud, we’re ready to help our customers get there first.”

Workday says that its new solution is an answer to a new set of challenges that organizations face: managing deployments, ensuring security and compliance, optimizing impact, and managing costs. The Agent System of Record is meant to provide an efficient, secure way to onboard new AI agents, define their roles and responsibilities, track their impact, budget and forecast their costs, support compliance, and foster continuous improvement.

With a single system to manage AI agents across a company’s workforce, Workday provides IT and business leaders with transparency and control over the impact of AI agents on work.

“At Workday, we believe that humans and agents should peacefully coexist in a way that amplifies human performance,” said Carl Eschenbach, CEO, Workday. “As the system of record for more than 10,500 organizations 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.”

The benefits of utilizing the Agent System of Record include:

• Centralized Management: Within a single system, organizations can manage all AI agents to gain transparency into their impact and effectiveness.
• Streamlined Agent Onboarding: Users will be able to quickly onboard new agents with defined roles, skills, and secure access to relevant data, accelerating time to value.
• Managing and Optimizing Costs: To ensure efficiency and effective business outcomes for users, the solution will optimize the return on investment (ROI) of AI agents.
• Support Secure and Compliant Deployment: Agents can be deployed with confidence through leveraging automated configuration, access controls, and policy enforcement to mitigate risk.
• Real-Time Operational Visibility: Users can monitor agent activity, enforce policies, and track costs in real time to optimize performance and ROI. Maintain continuous agent oversight with real-time identity verification, agent orchestration, and financial cost monitoring for optimal performance.

“The Workday Agent System of Record represents a significant advancement that will help PwC continue driving our clients to the leading edge of AI innovation,” said Matt Wood, U.S. and Global Commercial Technology and Innovation Officer, PwC. “By collaborating with Workday, we help our clients adopt Workday delivered AI capabilities, including the use of agents, to make AI intrinsic to everything they do with a focus on compliance, optimizing costs, and driving continuous improvement. We look forward to helping our clients unlock new opportunities and achieve their business goals through this innovative platform.”

New role-based AI agents

In addition to the announcement of the Agent System of Record, Workday is also debuting new role-based AI agents that help customers deploy and manage through the new system. These role-based agents have configurable skills that give them more autonomy and the ability to fully support people in their roles.

According to Workday, these new agents can perform hundreds of individual tasks. These new agents include:

• Contracts Agent: This AI agent continuously analyzes contracts across the enterprise, surfaces obligations, and opportunities buried in unstructured data, while driving business actions to capture value and mitigate risk.
• Payroll Agent: Identifies efficiency and mitigates risk during the audit experience by connecting complex business documents to monitor transactions, reconcile balances, and review internal controls. Allows audit firms to develop apps that connect directly to their Workday customers.
• Financial Auditing Agent: This role-based agent connects complex business documents to monitor transactions, reconcile balances, and review internal controls, thus increasing efficiency and mitigating risk during the audit experience. It also allows audit firms to develop applications that connect directly to their Workday customers.
• Policy Agent: This agent continuously reads a company’s latest corporate policy details followed by seamlessly and proactively sending the information it collects to employees and managers wherever they are asking questions or doing work. It allows HR help desks to focus on more complex cases by delivering a simplified self-service user experience, more compliant transactions, and deflection of tactical case volume.

“We believe the enterprise reinvention in the GenAI era will create a seamless working experience between people and agents,” said Julie Sweet, CEO, Accenture. “The agent lifecycle should be fully managed. We need them to be trained. They have to follow our compliance policies. They need to understand our values, and they need to be monitored for performance. That’s why it’s so exciting to see what Workday is doing to help companies manage in this new landscape.”

AI Agents from Workday, as well as those from Workday partners, can be found in the Workday Marketplace. Customers and partners will soon be able to augment, customize, and complement AI agents that integrate seamlessly with Workday through Workday’s developer platform: Workday Extend.

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