New generative AI capabilities to amplify human performance at work

Platform approach, unrivaled dataset, and commitment to trust are prerequisites for successful generative AI applications for the enterprise.

Imagine your organization leveraging generative AI to streamline business planning, enhance employee experience, facilitate seamless financial processes, and speed up application development.

Well, it’s no longer just a dream for management, HR, finance and DevOps practitioners – or employees in various functional roles.

At Workday Rising 2023, the company known for its enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources announced multiple new generative AI capabilities that will help increase productivity, grow and retain talent, streamline business processes, and drive better decision-making.

The new capabilities showcased at the annual customer conference in San Francisco’s Moscone Center, which saw more than 15,000 attendees, span the Workday platform to benefit all users – from finance and HR teams to people managers and individual users across an organization.

These new generative AI features support use cases including job descriptions, contract analysis, knowledge management, collections letters, app development, employee growth plans, and statements of work are expected to begin rolling out to customers within the next 6 to 12 months, joining Workday’s growing roster of more than 40 AI and ML features already in the market.

Commitment to trust

According to all the key Workday spokespersons at the event, Workday is committed to transparency through explainability, helping users leverage AI with trust and confidence. As such, the generative AI capabilities announced are designed to optimize human-machine teaming, utilizing AI to generate content quickly, while empowering the user to apply their skills, judgment, and experience to personalize and validate that content.

Workday’s generative AI approach involves its platform strategy, unrivaled dataset, and commitment to delivering trustworthy solutions that demonstrate the power of human-machine teaming. AI and ML are embedded in the core of the Workday platform, enabling the company to rapidly deliver cutting-edge solutions to customers across all applications.

“Workday is the technical backbone that brings our finance, HR, and operational data together in one place to help us manage our people and effectively run our business,” said Art Kilmer, chief operating officer, P.F. Chang’s China Bistro. “The AI embedded into the Workday platform helps augment our people so we can move faster, make more strategic decisions, and deliver operational efficiencies across our entire business, ultimately enabling us to better serve our customers.”

Workday AI models are fueled by more than 625 billion transactions processed by the system every year – resulting in the world’s largest, cleanest set of financial and HR data – which allows the models to consistently generate accurate, meaningful, trustworthy results.

“Generative AI has the potential to completely transform work as we know it,” said Sayan Chakraborty, co-president, Workday. “When applied responsibly, it has the power to elevate performance and to free up time to focus on the valuable work we really want and need to be doing. At Workday, we build enterprise-grade capabilities that are trustworthy, transparent, safe, and that keep the user in the driver’s seat at all times. Workday, our customers, and their employees are writing the playbook for how the future works together.”

“More than 10,000 organizations around the world rely on Workday to manage their most valuable assets – their people and their money,” said Carl Eschenbach, co-CEO, Workday. “They trust Workday to provide powerful, responsible, transparent solutions that will propel their businesses forward. With the power of AI and ML and an ecosystem of industry-leading partners, we are writing the playbook for the way the future works.”

Job descriptions

Workday users create 30 million job descriptions per year – taking an average of one to two hours every time. This capability will enable hiring managers and recruiters to generate job descriptions in minutes versus hours, freeing up considerable time to search for quality candidates rather than on administrative tasks.

By leveraging information already stored in Workday as the single source of truth for people data – such as the skills needed for the role and job location details – users can create precisely targeted job descriptions to help find the best candidates.

Talent retention

Talent retention is a top priority for organizations everywhere, and managers are responsible for their direct reports’ growth and development. This capability will enable managers to quickly create a summary of employees’ strengths and areas of growth, pulling from Workday’s rich database of insight such as performance reviews, employee feedback, contribution goals, skills, and more.

Since Workday is transparent about how its AI models are designed, managers can easily understand how the data inputs contribute to a strength or area of growth. This capability will make the career check-in process more personalized and effective, empowering both managers and employees.

Contract analysis

Sales teams negotiate and win contracts, and finance teams then have to ensure the company is paid via accurate billing and revenue recognition. But contracts can be lengthy, and information embedded within them can easily be missed.

With this contract analysis generative AI capability, organizations will be able to compare signed contracts against contracts in Workday Financial Management and integrated CRM data in record time. The feature will alert the user to any discrepancies early in the process and propose corrections, then confirm when discrepancies are fixed.

This early analysis and correction capability helps eliminate downstream accounting errors, saving considerable time trying to reverse and correct downstream transactions.

Knowledge management content creation

Creating content to keep employees informed about company policies and updates can be time consuming and frustrating, often requiring the author to search, read, and synthesize multiple sources to draft an article for employees’ understanding. What took hours will take minutes, with just a few clicks in Workday Help.

New generative AI capabilities will enable content creators to draft articles that are highly personalized and tailored to their audience – such as talking points for managers about a new company bonus policy, or key takeaways from company videos.

These new capabilities can help the author improve the tone or length of the article, iterate on particular sections, or even translate the article to different languages to support a global workforce, saving users valuable time and the frustration of writer’s block.

Debt collection

Generative AI capabilities will enable finance teams to automate the process of crafting past due notices with recommendations on the tone of the correspondence, driven by how late the customer is, or how often they are late, to save valuable time.

Finance teams will also be able to use Workday generative AI to automate letters in bulk – based on configured rules – to easily send an entire package, including past invoices, enabling collections agents to greatly increase their throughput and recapture missing funds sooner.

Statements of work in procurement

Procuring services can be a time-consuming activity for many corporations, typically with many teams involved – line of business, legal, procurement, and more. Gaining efficiencies in statement of work (SOW) clause creation and refinement is critical for organizations that want to move quickly and execute their priorities and business strategy flawlessly.

Workday generative AI will help organizations automate this process, reducing the time and effort it requires, while also suggesting the relevant clauses to be included depending on the type of project, project location, type of deliverables, and more.

Text-to-code app development

Every business has unique needs and challenges. Workday Extend puts the same technology, security, logic, and application components that power Workday into customers’ own hands to build custom apps that live in and run on Workday.

Developer Copilot, a human-machine teaming capability for Workday Extend app development, will leverage the power of generative AI to support the entire development lifecycle for rapid creation of finance and people management apps. Natively embedded into Workday’s App Builder, Developer Copilot will provide text-to-code generation capabilities to dramatically improve developer productivity and customer time-to-value by turning natural language into app code.

Developer Copilot will be contextually aware, providing curated content and search results that meet developers where they are, upskilling them and elevating the development experience.

Conversational AI user experience

Workday also previewed capabilities it is exploring at the intersection of conversational UI and generative AI to enhance users’ ability to interact with information and tasks in a natural way, taking advantage of the unique capabilities generative AI offers such as summarization, search, maintaining context, and more.

“We recognize that generative AI is a powerful technology with the potential to have great impact on conversational experiences, and you will see us apply it in ways that generative AI is uniquely suited for,” said Jeff Gelfuso, chief design officer, Workday. “We are incredibly excited about the possibilities at the intersection of conversational UI and generative AI, and you can expect Workday to deliver capabilities in the future that will unlock endless possibilities for reimagining how to interact with our products.”