Enterprise management software company Workday Inc. is following in the footsteps of its industry peers, unleashing a host of new artificial intelligence agents in its flagship platform, saying they will help users to get more work done faster.

The new AI agents, unveiled at Workday’s annual user conference Workday Rising today, are built on what the company says is an extremely sophisticated AI model trained on one of the most comprehensive human resources and financial datasets in the world.

They were unveiled within Workday Illuminate, the latest version of the company’s AI platform. The company also revealed it has made a key acquisition, buying a document intelligence startup called Evisort Inc. for an undisclosed price.

Workday said its new AI agents will pave the way for users to automate workflows across recruitment, human resource management, expenses reporting, succession planning and more, while also helping to optimize various other business processes. The agents are joined by a new Workday Assistant that leverages generative AI to help workers dig up information and insights and complete simple business tasks.

The company points out that its flagship, cloud-based platform encompasses one of the largest datasets in the world, processing more than 800 billion business transactions each year. In addition, Workday also has access to the context of various business processes, so it knows when and why a certain process was chosen and how it works.

It also understands how various processes are connected to each other, as well as the roles of individuals within an organization. All of this information has helped Workday to build what it says is the most comprehensive financial and human resources-based data model on the planet.

That model is what powers an array of exciting functionality in Workday Illuminate. For instance, Workday Assistant’s generative AI capabilities enable it to perform everyday business tasks such as creating and summarizing job descriptions, emails, messages and more. It can also help provide insights into various complex financial and human resource-related processes, providing real-time guidance to employees as they struggle with various tasks.

AI agents automate finance and human resources

As for the AI agents, these are dedicated AI tools that can help to automate more specific tasks within organizations. For instance, the Recruiter Agent will help with tasks related to staff recruitment, like sourcing job candidates, initiating contact with those candidates, talent recommendations and more. It will also assist in writing job descriptions and scheduling interviews, the company said.

The Expenses Agent is designed to create and submit expense reports, facilitating this process by prompting employees to submit transactions relating to their work. There’s also a Succession Agent, which can help human resources teams by proactively identifying future leaders within their organization, suggesting updates to succession plans, and developing custom plans to help them nurture their most promising talents.

Finally, there’s an Optimize Agent that’s said to help by identifying bottlenecks in business processes that can be smoothed out so as to help organizations run more efficiently.

With its new AI Agents, Workday is looking to compete with rival enterprise software companies like Salesforce Inc., Microsoft Corp. and ServiceNow Inc., who have all announced agentic offerings of their own to automate work-related tasks such as marketing, workflow management, accounting, and so on.

Workday Chief Product Officer David Somers emphasized his belief that Workday Illuminate will transform the way enterprise work gets done, empowering employees to become much more productive. It’s a bold claim, all the more so considering that many organizations claim to have experienced significant problems in utilizing similar AI agents to boost their productivity.

“It’s the combination of data and context around that data that allows us to provide highly personalized, accurate and transformative capabilities,” he explained. “That context includes things like different processes that are connected, people and roles involved, and previous conversational AI interactions.”

Workday is so confident that the additional context it provides will make a difference that it’s also promoting similar AI tools from its partner ecosystem. With Workday Illuminate, customers will be able to orchestrate AI agent processes created by third parties through the same platform, it said.

Workday Chief Executive Carl Eschenbach conceded that many enterprises are struggling to implement AI in a way that drives meaningful results, and tried to reassure them that his company’s offerings will not lead to similar struggles. “By placing tangible business value, responsible innovation and user-centric design at the forefront, Workday Illuminate empowers businesses to harness AI’s full potential to drive unprecedented productivity and move forever forward,” he said.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller said Workday’s AI agents look promising, thanks mostly to the strengths of its underlying data models that help it to deliver “third-level transformational” capabilities.

“It will be interesting to see how the first batch of AI agents can illuminate the daily work of thousands of Workday users,” he added. “Most of its new AI agents are a little out there. It’s also encouraging to see the focus on Workday Extend, with more partners using it than ever, which shows the company’s readiness to allow third-parties to build automations in its platform. That’s a clear departure from Workday’s original position of trying to do everything itself.” \

Document intelligence on the way

The AI agents promise to be a significant evolution of Workday’s platform, but the company says its AI journey is still just beginning, with many more new capabilities on the way. Having just acquired Evisort, the company is planning to enhance its offerings further with a huge dose of document intelligence.

San Francisco-based Evisort was founded in 2016 and has developed a number of AI modules that enable customers to analyze documents such as revenue contracts, asset agreements and supplier invoices, ostensibly to check them for errors and omissions. Of course, it can also extract various insights from those documents.

For instance, the software can highlight aspects such as unclaimed benefits in supplier agreements, evaluate document language against historical benchmarks, and alert customers to upcoming dates, such as contract renewals.

Evisort CEO Jerry Ting said Workday is already working hard to integrate these features into its own platforms, and that they should become available to users in the coming months. “AI is a powerful force transforming how organizations convert unstructured data in documents into strategic business decisions,” he said.

Workday said the acquisition is expected to close by the end of the third quarter.

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