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In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I discuss the exciting new features of Workday’s Illuminate AI while on location at Workday Rising.
Highlights
00:08 — One of the big things that’s come out of this is Workday’s unveiling of a very broad end-to-end AI program called Illuminate. It’s got now four new agents. It said more and more will be coming.
01:05 — Workday’s focus is HCM and financials. But it’s talking about industries and industry-specific capabilities enriched with AI. It started with some industry-specific features, then industry-specific apps like Supply Chain Management for Healthcare. With Workday Student, it’s got a whole suite that covers that market.
01:59 — There’s also been a lot of talk about the natural language revolution. Workday pushed very hard on the notion that it now has 70 million users and 800 billion annual transactions that happen within Workday systems. Aneel Bhusri, Workday’s chairman, said he believes AI is going to be even more disruptive than cloud.
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03:26 — A big part of this new effort with AI is leveraging the experience that Workday has gained in machine learning and other areas. It feels that it has some advantages because it’s seen itself as a tech company that also does applications. One area where that’s coming out clearly is with its Extend platform, and they’re going to be offering lots and lots of additional capabilities to customers and partners.
04:16 — Workday’s ability to go more deeply into industry-specific solutions is predicated on this notion of having more and more contributions from their customers and from their partners. An interesting, exciting rollout here of Illuminate AI from Workday—they seem to have thought this through very clearly.
