This week on The Weekly Dose, I’m going to discuss some recent announcements from Workday around some AI functionality they’ve launched. Workday might be the biggest brand in HR. You would have had to been completely sleeping through the past twenty years not to understand the giant impact Workday has made in HR Technology. There might not be another single brand in HR Tech that has taken more overall market share in the past couple of decades than Workday.

I think it’s important to have a productive conversation around Workday because of how many users use Workday in HR, Learning, and TA on a daily basis. Large HCM technology runs most HR shops across the globe, and while they might be as nimble as HR startups, they do the vast majority of blocking and tackling in HR.

In January, when ChatGPT and Generative AI became the most talked about topic of the year, my feeling then, and now, was that we would really have to wait and see how companies like Workday build out this new AI technology within the systems and processes we use every day. This is truly how most of us will experience AI, so I’m excited to see Workday’s recent announcements because this will really be the future of HR Technology for most of us.

What are the big Workday AI announcements?

• “Ask Workday” – one of the major announcements that will feel most familiar to many of us is the Ask Workday feature built on Generative AI. In an everyday sense of how most users use HR Technology, this feature, to me, is how I imagined AI would impact us! Having a hiring manager ask something like, “What is the activity on my open jobs?” Instead of waiting to get a response from a recruiter, the hiring manager can get a real-time data-driven narrative, which is truly a game changer. But it’s more than that because this is also something employees can use to shape their career path, etc.
• “Manager Insights Hub” – This is a new feature that truly uses the power of AI and Workday’s data insights. This is a completely integrated Manager portal that lets any manager of people look at employee goals, development plans, feedback, and other information in a single integrated page. This is a feature completely designed to solve one of the major deficits we see in so many organizations – making our leaders better! This feature also helps the manager and employee create a growth plan.
• Automatically create Job Descriptions from Workday’s LLM, create policies, how-to guides, etc. This is what so many of us expected from GPT-like AI built into our HR systems, so this wasn’t unexpected, but it’s nice to see how quickly some of this tech has been rolled out and able to be used in real-world everyday HR use cases.

While just a start, it shows how serious Workday is at moving as fast as they can to leverage this new technology and help HR teams become more productive. I’m excited to see the direction they continue to evolve this technology around things like skills measuring, matching of skills to jobs, and the potential for screening both candidates and internal candidates to jobs.

It’s clear from these recent announcements that we should be prepared to see ongoing announcements coming from the large HCM players in our space. AI is transforming all of our functional systems and technology, and Workday is moving fast to take advantage of the productivity gains that can be made, but also how AI can transform your HR practice across the enterprise.