Workday Rising 25 - Workday launches more agents, but the new Build platform and Data Cloud will steal the show

Workday is making a bold pitch to be the agentic AI platform for the enterprise with a set of new product and platform announcements today for the opening of its annual Rising conference, which has returned to San Francisco in the vendor’s 20th anniversary year. Along with eleven new agents to automate processes such as performance reviews, workforce planning, and financial close, and the new option of consumption-based pricing, a new agentic developer platform massively expands the scope for building custom automations, agents and applications on the Workday platform, while a new zero-copy Data Cloud provides a unified data layer for AI analysis and operations. In a press statement, Gerrit Kazmaier, Workday’s new President of Product & Technology, spells out the mission:

With purpose-built AI agents and a single, open enterprise platform, we’re redefining ERP for the AI era — transforming it from a passive system of record into a system of action that drives real outcomes.

New agents for the HR function include a case agent for dealing with questions from employees, a performance agent that collects and analyzes data ahead of performance reviews, an employee sentiment agent, an agent that helps manage contracts for contingent labor, and a job architecture agent for creating and managing career advancement pathways or 'job ladders'. There's also a "Business Process Copilot Agent" that automates the configuration and deployment of new workflows.

New agents in finance include an agent that helps users set up and query cost and profitability metrics, an agent that automates parts of the financial close process and provides real-time visibility into progress, and an agent that continuously tests financials for overall health, signs of fraud, or compliance exceptions. Two agents for the education sector help with the creation of academic requirements and help automate repetitive administrative student tasks. These are billed as Workday's first industry agents, suggesting that agents for other industries may follow in future releases. The agents announced this week are slated for availability in 2026.

Reflecting a growing move towards consumption-based pricing for AI agents, Workday is introducing Flex Credits, which can be applied against agent and platform usage. Customers receive a set number of credits as part of their normal Workday subscription, and can purchase more as their AI usage expands. Flex Credits are fully fungible, which means they effectively act as a currency that customers can apply against any usage type, with some usage types requiring more credits than others.

Workday Build and Data Cloud

A major expansion of the ability to add custom functionality to Workday comes with the unveiling of Workday Build, a new developer platform for creating, sharing and scaling AI-powered solutions on Workday. This includes Flowise Agent Builder, the low-code visual development tool for AI chatbots and agents that Workday acquired last month, bringing full agent-building capabilities to the Workday platform. Build also encompasses the AI developer toolset announced in June at Workday DevCon, along with the existing Workday Extend extensibility framework, which has previously been the extent of custom capability supported by Workday, and now becomes a component of Build.

The announcement of Workday Data Cloud brings Workday into the fold of enterprise vendors whose AI platforms provide zero-copy access to external data sources, starting with Snowflake, Databricks and Salesforce. These partners also have zero-copy access to Workday data from their own platforms. The purpose is to allow aggregation of data from various sources for analysis and decision-making, whether by humans or AI agents, such as linking Workday’s financial data with market, risk or sales data in Databricks to power real-time forecasting and scenario planning, or adding the likes of product sales data, sales team KPIs or operational metrics such as case resolution times from Salesforce to retention and performance data from Workday, allowing analysis of these employee metrics in the context of specific business outcomes. The components of Data Cloud are:

• Workday Data Lake — allows secure, easy access to a curated catalog of Workday business objects across Workday's HCM, recruiting, payroll, learning, student, and financial and spend management applications.
• Workday Data Connect — enables two-way, zero-copy data sharing between Workday and external data platforms through an Apache Iceberg connection.
• Workday Live Data Query — provides direct SQL access to Workday's core business data, enabling near real-time business insights.
• Workday Prism — the existing Workday analytics platform will now support inbound zero-copy queries from external platforms, allowing analysis of Workday financial or HCM data alongside other data sets in Snowflake, Databricks or Salesforce Data Cloud, while remaining subject to Workday's governance and security parameters.

My take

While customers will likely focus on the latest additions to Workday’s line-up of agents, the platform announcements are the strategic play here. Workday has historically been very cautious about allowing customers and partners to build out their own custom functionality. It took the company a very long time even to introduce its Workday Extend platform, and it has maintained tight control over sharing of applications and extensions by customers and partners with an exhaustive certification and approvals program.

With the introduction of Build, of which Extend is just one component, there's a massive expansion of freedom for developers to build on the platform, and it will be interesting to find out more details about what governance Workday plans to put around the sharing and marketing of Build components and agents, particularly by partners.

Meanwhile, the launch of Workday Data Cloud with its zero-copy capabilities is intended to ensure that enterprises who wish to can center their AI agent strategy on their Workday investment, rather than shifting the center of gravity to other platforms. This is part of the behind-the-scenes battle going on for vendors to retain mindshare, and therefore market share, as the shift to agentic AI automation develops at pace.

The introduction of consumption-based pricing is another shift where AI is forcing the pace, as foreshadowed when I spoke earlier this year to Evisort CEO Jerry Ting, now also Workday's Head of Agentic AI.

One other development to welcome is a shift in language away from the casual discussion of 'digital labor' and a 'digital workforce' that was prevalent earlier this year to embrace a much more co-operative relationship between humans and agents. This wording from the agent press release presents a much more balanced take on the issues enterprises are grappling with as they figure out the future of work:

Designed to work alongside people, these agents handle repetitive, time-consuming tasks so employees can focus on higher-value work... HR leaders are navigating the complexities of an AI-powered workplace — rethinking how people thrive in a new era of AI. They’re under pressure to attract, retain, and engage talent while reducing administrative burden.

We'll have much more reporting and analysis of what this all means as the event continues this week.

You can find all of our Workday Rising 2025 coverage in our event hub.