Leveraging data from the 800 billion annual transactions its applications process each year, Workday has released an end-to-end AI platform called Illuminate to help its 70 million users move at the speed of the outside world by transforming archaic processes into intelligent approaches to dazzling customers.
Since the onset of the AI Revolution almost two years ago, Workday has frequently said it has been an AI and machine learning (ML) pioneer and is leveraging that advanced-technology legacy to become a leader in AI technology, innovation, solutions, and applications.
All of that potential has come together in Illuminate, which spans the company’s core areas of HCM and Finance; Illuminate is at the heart of four new agents introduced at Rising. Perhaps even more important, Illuminate is also being positioned as a core element of Workday’s third strategic pillar: industries.
I found this to be one of the most-interesting angles within the Illuminate launch because leading businesses in many verticals have begun deploying AI for forward-looking industry-specific apps. With competitors SAP and Oracle pushing aggressively into AI-powered industry solutions, Workday is keeping pace by weaving Illuminate AI into its strategic development of industry-specific capabilities.
And Workday is intensifying that industry initiative, according to chairman and cofounder Aneel Bhusri. Workday’s industry focus began several years ago with the launch of some industry-specific funtionality; the company then rolled out some industry-specific apps such as Supply Chain Management for Healthcare, and most recently has moved into what Bhusri called Industry Operational Apps, such as Workday Student.
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“We will follow this development curve for every industry we’re in,” Bhusri said in his opening keynote session on Tuesday.
Throughout that multi-part keynote, Workday executives repeatedly focused on some key themes around Illuminate:
- the need for LLMs that are focused on a business’s unique needs;
- the need for business leaders to focus first on the desired outcomes they want to achieve —some Workday execs call these “iconic outcomes” — and then working backwards to find the appropriate technologies;
- the recognition that business leaders must fight through what Bhusri called “the trough of disillusionment” from early AI projects and keep experimenting — and investing;
- the need for AI to handle data in a way that delivers proper context for customers;
- the increasing power for Workday to drive co-creation partnerships with customers and its ecosystem; and
- the coming age of natural-language conversations as the primary way that people will engage with technology.
“The future of UX is AI,” Bhusri said, noting that very little has changed in how people engage with computers since Steve Jobs conjured up the point-and-click model 50 years ago.
“And we think AI is going to be even more disruptive than the cloud.”
