Workday DevCon is the annual developer conference hosted by Workday. This year, the event was held at Resorts World Las Vegas and began with a comprehensive keynote presentation by Sam Ruscica and Josh Lane from Workday.
In front of an audience of over 8,000 attendees, including 1,500 builders, several special guests joined the keynote to share exciting news for the Workday developer community and beyond. Workday CTO Gabe Monroy took the stage early in the presentation to update the audience on how Workday is simplifying the complexities of AI for developers while still enabling them to harness its power. The key is a more open, yet secure approach.
“Let me be really explicit about our commitment back to you first, flexibility,” said Monroy. “We’re not going to force you onto one model, one UI, or one way to build. Second, on the ecosystem front, we’re going to make it easier to connect to the tech that you already use.
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“And third, and critically, guardrails, we are opening up the platform, but we’re also making sure we’re keeping all of the security that matters.” Building on Monroy’s commitment to developers, Jay Wieczorkowski, VP and GM of the Developer Platform at Workday, made a significant platform announcement. Addressing the audience, he told them that Workday Build is now agent-ready.
“We’ve re-imagined the developer platform from the entire ground up for us to build the agent tech future together, and you know what, it looks a lot different than before,” he said. That was the standout platform announcement from the keynote, but Wieczorkowski quickly followed it up with the day’s most important product announcement: the launch of Developer Agent.
Introducing Developer Agent
Developer Agent enables developers to build on Workday using plain language through their chosen agentic tool. Developer agents connect over MCP and have over 50 built-in development skills for fully agentic development workflows.
At a roundtable event following the keynote, Developer Agent was at the top of the agenda. When asked about the impact Developer Agent would have had on him at the start of his career, Obinna Ekwuno, Senior Developer Advocate at Workday, said:
“Oh, it would have unblocked a lot of the early debugging that you have to do when you’re in the loop of creating an application, testing, seeing how it works, coming back, going to documentation. Right now you just have that right in the ID, and that’s really amazing.”
Although Developer Agent was the most significant development, it wasn’t the only topic discussed in the agentic AI space. A noteworthy addition is Workday’s new Agent-Ready Tools. These tools are specifically designed to enable agents to work safely with Workday Data and are protected by the Workday agent system. “They are published over MCP, making [them] really easy to discover and dead simple to use, and ultimately they deliver better agent outcomes,” explained Dean Arnold, VP, AI Platform, Workday.
“Agents don’t just live inside Workday, they need to reach into the enterprise, and with agent actions, we are bringing over 1,000 Pipedream connectors to the platform that allows agents to act on the enterprise systems our customers use every day.”
For developers, the takeaways from this vibrant keynote are overwhelmingly positive: a more open, agent-ready platform that promises to accelerate application development while maintaining enterprise-grade security and governance.
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