Firms must adopt skills-based strategy for human-AI workforce

Companies must shift from a traditional, credential-based view of their staff to a skills-based strategy to successfully integrate a new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) agents into their workforce, according to a senior Workday executive.

Fabio Tiviti, Workday’s group vice-president for field operations in Asia-Pacific and Japan, said in a recent interview with Computer Weekly that as AI agents become more prevalent, they should be treated as “digital employees” with a specific set of skills and capabilities.

“You have humans and digital agents that will need to coexist in the same workforce,” said Tiviti. “Therefore, you need to treat digital employees the same way you treat humans.”

That means subjecting AI agents to the full employee management lifecycle. “You need to find them, onboard them, train them, and you need a succession plan. You need them to develop cross-functional skills, and sometimes you also need to offboard them,” he added.

Without this shift to a skills-based strategy, Tiviti warned that AI could be seen as a threat rather than enhancing an organisation’s workforce. “It can be perceived as potentially replacing humans, which is definitely not the way we envision this to happen,” he said.

Central to managing this new, blended workforce is governance. Tiviti stressed the need for “one system of record” that can manage human employees and the growing pool of AI agents, whether built in-house or integrated from third-party providers.

“If you don’t have one system of record that connects your in-house agents, as well as third-party agents that you can’t control, then it’s impossible to manage your workforce from a governance standpoint,” he said.

The move to a skills-based model is already underway. Citing a global survey of more than 2,300 business leaders, Tiviti noted that over 40% of companies in Singapore have started adopting a skills-based strategy, with roughly 60% of those already reporting benefits such as bolstering innovation.

You have humans and digital agents that will need to coexist in the same workforce. Therefore, you need to treat digital employees the same way you treat humans

However, he acknowledged that change management is still a significant hurdle, with nearly half of the survey’s respondents (49%) citing it as a key barrier to adoption.

For organisations starting out with AI agents, Tiviti advises automating monotonous, repetitive tasks first to free up employees for more strategic work. He also emphasised the importance of human oversight, particularly in sensitive areas like hiring, adding that an agent’s role is to augment human decision-making.

“The agent is not there to replace the recruiter and the hiring manager,” said Tiviti. “The agent is there to facilitate, speed up the process and provide some high-level recommendations, working in tandem with humans. That’s pretty much at the core of all the role-based agents we’ve developed.”

Workday’s role-based agents are equipped with specific skills, such as for recruitment or financial audits, along with the ability to understand the complexities of job functions within an organisation to improve productivity. Tiviti said. For instance, he noted that Workday’s recruitment agent has been shown to increase a recruiter’s capacity by 54% and reduce review time for hiring managers by 35%. 

Ultimately, Tiviti believes that having a forward-thinking AI strategy will be key in the war for talent, as top candidates will gravitate towards companies that have thoughtfully embedded AI into their culture.

“I think the top talent in the market will join companies that have started their journey with AI,” said Tiviti. “They would want to see that the company has a workforce strategy that includes employees and AI agents, which is going to be a differentiator.”

Workday has been positioning itself to manage the hybrid workforce of people and digital employees with the recent launch of new capabilities to help customers integrate and govern third-party AI agents.

Announced at its DevCon 2025 conference, the Workday Agent Partner Network and Agent Gateway will enable organisations to connect AI agents from partners such as Accenture, Microsoft, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services directly into Workday’s agent system of record. This creates a single control plane to manage a diverse fleet of agents, ensuring they operate securely and in line with business goals.

The Agent Gateway, which will be available to early adopters by the end of 2025, uses shared protocols, including Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent-to-Agent Protocol (A2A), to allow seamless communication between agents built by Workday and its partners.