Welcome to the Cloud Wars Minute — your daily cloud news and commentary show. Each episode provides insights and perspectives around the “reimagination machine” that is the cloud.
In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I explore how the rise of digital workers and AI agents is reshaping the workforce and how Workday is meeting the moment.
Highlights
00:31 — We’re talking now about a complete workforce here, part human, part digital. The rise of agents is really going to feed into that. Workday is placing a big bet, maybe the biggest the company’s ever made. It’s got a product called the Agent System of Record, and it has a lot of capabilities with agents.
01:04 — There are also several other Cloud Wars Top 10 companies attempting to be this key orchestrator for all these agents that are going to flow into the workforce. Chief Product Officer David Summers said digital workers are joining human workers as one combined workforce, and he said the companies that don’t embrace managing this complexity will be left behind.
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02:28 — How do we also ensure that they’re working capably side by side, harmoniously with the human workers? For 20 years, Workday has helped some of the world’s largest organizations handle their human workforce very well. Workday believes that it has a leg up now on being able to handle this parallel incoming digital workforce made up of agents.
02:57 — It says, with this Agent System of Record, it is able to handle it technologically and then also in an organized way that business people can see. Microsoft and Google Cloud will certainly want to be able to do that. ServiceNow wants to be the control tower for AI. Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce, the big applications vendors, are moving aggressively into agents.
04:08 — As we often see in the Cloud Wars, this intense competition gives customers lots of choices, alternatives, and ways they can move on this. And no doubt, here is where the Agent Wars kick in and become a huge front within the broader Cloud Wars.
