Workday sets out to reinvent ERP with agentic AI platform

At Workday’s Rising conference in Barcelona, the HR and financial applications SaaS supplier fleshed out what looks like a strategic shift towards being an agentic AI platform that could disrupt traditional enterprise resource planning (ERP).  

In his opening keynote, CEO Carl Eschenbech positioned Workday as the “enterprise AI platform for managing people, money and agents”. The supplier now offers a swathe of agents in its Illuminate platform.

Gerrit Kazmaier, president of product and technology at Workday, further positioned Workday in his keynote as a so-called new “front door to work”, with recent acquisition Sana – a Sweden-based AI-based knowledge management company – a key piece in an evident widening of scope beyond software for HR and finance professionals.

In an executive panel for media present at the event, Eschenbach downplayed a question suggesting it was disrupting the ERP market, dominated for many years by rivals SAP and Oracle, saying: “A lot of companies are absolutely competitor obsessed and customer aware. We at Workday are customer obsessed and competitor aware. We focus on bringing value to our customers.”

In the same session, Kazmaier pointed to Workday’s “being born in the cloud, with the one data model” as a differentiator from SAP, for which he worked from 2009 to 2021. He joined Workday in the past year from a four-year stint at Google.

Angelique De Vries-Schipperijn, president of Workday EMEA, said in a press statement: “Organisations across EMEA are navigating an increasingly complex and competitive landscape, making it essential to have a partner they can trust. Workday’s continued investments in local innovation, infrastructure, and our regional presence help organisations adapt, grow and thrive in this era of AI-powered transformation.”

In its main release, Workday said that it is making targeted investments in AI innovation, citing the launch of Workday GO as bringing its technologies to mid-size companies across the region, helping them to hire, pay and manage global teams through one unified AI-based platform.

It also cited its Pay Transparency Analyzer product, co-developed with Kainos, which is said to help organisations comply with the EU Pay Transparency Directive and other local regulations, as well as strengthen pay equity practices.

The supplier has launched a developer network, Workday Build, that gives users the power to create, share and scale AI-powered services directly on Workday. This features Workday Flowise Agent Builder, a low-code tool that allows users to build, deploy and manage custom AI agents  

It has also announced new partnerships, such as Google BigQuery joining its “data cloud”, which also has Snowflake and Databricks as collaborators. This is said to give Workday customers a secure, “zero-copy” way to combine Workday HR and finance data with advanced analytics and AI tools.

In addition, the supplier has inaugurated a Workday EU Sovereign Cloud, based on AWS infrastructure, which is said to enable organisations to run their HR and finance applications entirely within EU borders.

The supplier’s regional presence now features more than 4,250 employees in 19 countries, Recent initiatives include the announcement of a €175m AI Centre of Excellence in Dublin, a forthcoming regional office in Dubai, and new sales and marketing teams in Warsaw to better serve Central and Eastern Europe.