Today, Workday introduced Workday Illuminate, the new brand name for Workday AI. While the name isn’t important, this new brand signals a shift from AI “dazzlers” to AI “capabilities” across the Workday platform. In other words, Workday has now built an underlying AI infrastructure that can manifest solutions in hundreds of ways.

Under the hood, Workday runs a 70 billion parameter LLM optimized for the HR and financial data within Workday. This means that the Workday application can now expose intelligent capabilities that bring intelligence to all the financial, HR, and operational elements of Workday.

In many ways, it’s a very advanced idea. (SAP does this too, by the way.) Using new capabilities (Agent workflows), Workday can now offer apps that identify budget overruns, look for out-of-range metrics, and tell managers that employees are working too much overtime. This results in an actionable solution: hire more people, cut hours, or redesign the business.

There are many valuable applications of this approach. The new Workday Job Architecture Intelligence agent (I know, complicated name) lets an HR manager see when skills are needed and when jobs with common skills could be merged. It also shows people with those skills who might be in the “wrong job” or who could benefit from a job change. (Kind of like a deterministic talent marketplace.)

The most interesting part of Illuminate is the new and improved Workday Assistant. With a UI that looks a bit like Microsoft Copilot, the Assistant is now much smarter and can help a Workday user complete a task by asking questions. It guides you through the transaction and gives you information to help along the way. It’s as easy to use as SAP Joule (not quite as feature-rich yet) and ADP Assist, but focuses primarily on Workday-internal functions today (it’s not an open Copilot yet).

Workday acknowledges that the UI needs help, so these capabilities are exactly what’s needed. And new agents (Recruiter agent, Succession agent) are already in demo mode, so you can see where things are headed. Workday is becoming agent-enabled and open to partners to build and integrate capabilities into the AI ​​infrastructure.

I’ll update you on other announcements later this week, but so far there’s been nothing but good news and a lot of excitement about Workday Rising this year.

Additional information

AI Agents, the new workforce we’re not quite ready for (Agentic AI)