Workday Inc. has become the latest technology provider to embrace the unique potential of generative artificial intelligence to enhance productivity in the workplace.

Today the human resources software pioneer unveiled a host of new generative AI capabilities and features in its platform that it says will drive productivity, streamline business processes and empower people to make better decisions, when they become available in the coming months.

Generative AI has emerged as the hottest trend in technology this year, driven by the incredible popularity of OpenAI LP’s ChatGPT, which can generate text based on prompts and engage in humanlike conversations. This ability to generate content has numerous potential applications in the workplace, and software providers have raced to integrate the technology into dozens of different applications and services.

Workday is somewhat late to the game, but it has made up for its delay by launching one of the most comprehensive catalogs of generative AI features announced so far, integrating the technology into all of its major platforms.

At its annual user conference Workday Rising today in San Francisco, the new AI offerings are said to be embedded into the very core of the Workday platform, which helps organize key business functions such as human capital management, financial management and enterprise resource planning. Enterprises use Workday to automate human resource management and business tasks such as payroll and expenses, while tracking and managing employee data.

Generative AI productivity enhancements

The company promised HR workers will see immediate productivity gains, with new generative AI capabilities that can automatically generate everything from new job descriptions to knowledge base articles, employee growth plans and statements of work. According to Workday, its customers create 30 million job listings every year, and each description takes between one and two hours to write. By doing this instantly, HR managers become much more productive, and can spend more of their time actually assessing candidates and interviewing them.

These capabilities will launch within the next six to 12 months, Workday said. “We recognize that generative AI is a powerful technology with the potential to have a great impact on conversational experiences, and you will see us apply it in ways that generative AI is uniquely suited for,” promised Jeff Gelfuso, chief design officer at Workday.

Increased developer velocity

Workday’s generative AI innovations will extend to developers too, helping them to build more intelligent and responsible applications. The new Workday AI Gateway within Workday Extend will launch in early 2024, providing an easier way for developers to build AI apps for finance and people processes, the company said. It incorporates services such as skills analysis, which uses the Workday Skills Cloud to compare and contrast employee’s skills, as well as sentiment analysis, analyzing digital text to determine the emotional tone of a message.

Developers will also be able to leverage the AI Gateway’s document intelligence to extract key data from documents such as resumes, receipts, contrast and other paperwork, while the new ML Forecaster tool can be leveraged by applications to make seasonal predictions for more accurate revenue forecasting and other tasks.

To accelerate AI app development, Workday said it’s integrating a number of Amazon Web Services Inc.’s AI services natively within the Workday Extend platform, including Amazon EventBridge, Comprehend, Rekognition, Textract and Translate. Workday Orchestrate will provide connectors to each of these services, enabling developers to interact with them while protecting their data through Workday’s security controls.

Streamlined user experiences

To streamline user experiences and collaboration across finance and HR, Workday will add conversational AI capabilities to Workday Adaptive Planning, making it easier to perform tasks such as headcount planning, reconciliation and reporting and more.

With these new features, which will also roll out in the next six to 12 months, Workday said HR teams will be able to converse with a chatbot to surface important data more quickly, uncover important and contextually relevant insights faster, and generate recommended actions based on them. It all adds up to an easy-to-use, guided experience for workforce planners to update existing positions and create new ones. These changes will be automatically reflected within the organization’s financial and aggregated headcount plans within Workday Adaptive Planning.

Simplified Human Capital Management

The generative AI updates in Workday’s Human Capital Management platform are centered on the new Manager Insights Hub, which is available now and aims to simplify manager experiences. Workday explained that managers are vital in the success of any business as they play a key role in driving growth and development. However, many struggle to keep pace with everything that’s happening across the teams they manage.

The Manager Insights Hub simplifies this, using AI to surface personalized recommendations such as connections, mentors and gigs, helping managers to proactively identify the best opportunities for each employee, based on their skills and interests. The result will be boosted employee mobility and engagement, and a more effective workforce, Workday said.

Another new feature in Workday HCM is Flex Teams, which can help managers to quickly identify talent within the organization. With this, they’ll be able to quickly assemble teams and define each member’s role in the project it’s tasked with. For instance, if a manager needs to create a team to market a new product, Flex Teams will scour the data within Workday Skills Cloud to see who the best people are, going by their availability, experience and skills.

Workday’s HCM Group General Manager David Somers said managers are under increased pressure to improve the productivity and performance of the teams working underneath them. “Workday is the single source of truth for people data, enabling us to surface relevant team information to managers when they need it most, helping them be more impactful,” he said. “Workday AI is making it easier for managers to succeed in their most important role: people leadership.”

Enterprise acceleration

The comprehensive announcements illustrate how Workday intends to infuse generative AI across both its enterprise software portfolio and technology stack to improve the end user and developer experience, said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. He believes Workday is showcasing its ambition as it is the first enterprise vendor to focus generative AI on improving the manager’s experience. “This is a very good, targeted focus that will help companies to achieve what matters most,” the analyst said. “It will enable enterprise acceleration. At the same time it intends to increase developer velocity, which involves creating the right automation within Workday Extend. Many of the new features are promising, but they will take time to arrive, so we’ll have to wait and see the kind of uptake it gets.”

User adoption will likely be determined by how effective Workday’s AI offerings are, Mueller added. Keeping that in mind, the company reassured customers that its generative AI features will be among the best around.

The secret, Workday said, is that its generative AI capabilities will be powered by its own, unrivaled HR dataset, which encompasses about 625 billion customer transactions annually. According to Workday, it owns the world’s largest and cleanest set of financial and HR data, and by tapping this it believes its models will provide uniquely accurate, meaningful and trustworthy results.

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