In this episode, Bob Evans sits down with Shane Luke, VP of AI and Machine Learning, Workday, and Ali Fuller, Senior Vice President of Experience, Workday, to discuss how organizations are navigating the rapid rise of GenAI and software implementation. The conversation dives into Workday’s innovative Agent System of Record, designed to manage digital agents as seamlessly as human employees, and introduces the company’s pragmatic three-phase customer framework.
Assist, Accelerate, Transform
The Big Themes:
- Workday’s Agent System of Record: Workday’s Agent System of Record manages the emerging digital agent ecosystem. It provides structure and governance to what could otherwise become a chaotic sprawl of AI agents. By embedding agent management into existing organizational hierarchies, Workday ensures that agents become a structured extension of the workforce rather than a disconnected experiment.
- Shift Toward Role-Based Agents: Workday is designing agents to reflect the roles and responsibilities of human workers. Rather than focusing narrowly on task or function-specific agents, Workday emphasizes role-based agents that closely align to actual jobs within an organization. Examples include payroll agents, financial audit agents, employee self-service agents, and recruiting agents.
- Three-Phase Customer Framework: To ease customer adoption, Workday has a three-step framework: Assist → Accelerate → Transform. The assist phase focuses on basic productivity improvements, giving employees relief from repetitive, low-value tasks. Then, companies enter the accelerate phase, expanding the use of agents to drive more meaningful efficiencies and process optimization. The final transform phase represents the full reimagining of work processes with human-agent collaboration at the core.
The Big Quote: “A mindset shift for us as AI developers is we made AI as features to solve problems, and now we’re thinking a lot about AI as a group of skills.”
More from Shane Luke, Ali Fuller, and Workday:
Connect with Shane and Ali on LinkedIn or learn more about Workday’s Agent System of Record.
