Enterprise management software company Workday Inc. today unveiled a workforce management system designed to help companies track, govern and optimize their growing artificial intelligence agent lineups.

Workday is calling the new platform the Agent System of Record. It’s aimed at helping businesses that are onboarding agents keep track of their new digital workforce and treat them the same way they do any other piece of software, while addressing new challenges that come with AI agents.

“The workforce is expanding,” said Workday Chief Executive Carl Eschenbach. “It’s no longer just human workers; it’s also digital workers.”

Eschenbach said the System of Record will provide businesses with an efficient way to onboard new AI Agents, define roles and responsibilities, track impact, budget and forecast costs and analyze compliance, all from a centralized dashboard that creates a single point of truth.

The trend toward agentic AI has already begun to have an impact on the enterprise by providing capable AI agents that can act with minimal or no human intervention. Role-based agents with skill sets similar to human workers can access large amounts of company data and use software tools to augment human workers by automating knowledge work and writing tasks.

However, similar to how software-as-a-service and rogue cloud software have caused the spread of software and services to creep into information technology and the looming issues of shadow IT, AI agent sprawl could cause just as many headaches.

The new system builds on Workday Illuminate, the latest version of the company’s AI platform, which brought generative AI agents to automate business workflows for customers such as recruitment, human resource management, expense reporting, succession planning and more.

At the heart of the Agent System of Record Workday said there would be an agent registration system that would provide organizations a roster of what agents are currently available. It includes role-based access for agents, their capabilities and the ability to activate and deactivate them. That will provide companies with an overseer role using the same role-based security capacity that’s used for employees with AI agents as well.

Working with Workday agents

Employees and users will access Workday agents through the Workday Assistant, which will act to manage and orchestrate the appropriate AI agent according to what an employee needs at the time. The assistant is an AI chatbot-like interface that will answer questions and invoke agents using natural language.

When a user needs a particular agent to activate, the Assistant will trigger it behind the scenes without users needing to figure it out themselves. They only need to ask a question or make a request.

“Our goal is to provide a simple and consistent conversational user experience as that primary user interface for all agents across Workday,” said Workday Chief Product Officer David Somers, “taking the burden off the user to figure out, ‘Where should I go to get an answer from a particular agent?’”

This same experience can be mapped across applications such as chat interfaces embedded in productivity apps or into Slack as well, Somers added.

Workday also announced the release of several new role-based AI agents that now will be included in the company’s agent Marketplace in addition to the company’s previously released agents. They include a Contracts Agent, a Payroll Agent, a Financial Auditing Agent and a Policy Agent.

Although most agents in the marketplace are task-based and follow step-by-step instructions, role-based agents are configurable based on a set of “skills” and designed to act on a broader autonomy within their roles. Thanks to this configuration, Workday says, they can be extended and tailored by the customer to better fit their particular industry or individual needs.

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