Workday VP: ‘The companies that lean into AI will attract better talent’
That’s the message from Jerry Ting, VP, Evisort, Workday, from the HR tech company’s Elevate event in London. UNLEASH was in attendance; here are our top highlights of the event on the AI-powered future of work.
Conference Insights
AI agents were the topic of the day at Workday Elevate in London.
UNLEASH was on the ground, and heard from Workday executives and partners to find out their perspectives on how enterprises can get ahead of the agentic AI curve.
Read on to find out our takeaways from the Workday event.
“Agents are the future of how we work with computers,” declared Jerry Ting, VP, Evisort, Workday, during the opening keynote at the HR tech giant’s Elevate event in London.
Ting is going to be leading the agent strategy at the HR tech giant; his AI-powered contract intelligence startup Evisort was bought by Workday in Sept last year.
“Everything that’s happened in the last 20 years brought us to this point…where machines can actually think like humans,” added Ting during a podcast recording at Elevate.
“Agents are the next generation of workers”; the benefit is that they “can take away the parts of the job that we don’t like”, so humans “can actually be more strategic and more thoughtful”.
The companies that lean into AI will attract the better talent,” continued Ting. The GPT generation are now in the workforce, and “they’re not going to be okay with using legacy processes”, he added on the podcast recording.
Workday is making a significant play around agentic AI through its Illuminate platform; as Dan Pell, GM UK&I at Workday, stated in the keynote: “We’re only just getting started.”
At Elevate, Workday announced some new Illuminate agents, including frontline agent, self-service agent and contract intelligence agent.
UNLEASH was at Workday Elevate – here are our top takeaways from the London event.
Dan Pell, GM of UKI at Workday, delivering his keynote at Elevate.
Workday as the agent system of record?
We’re living in times of uncertainty – when it comes to economics, politics and technology – and Workday sees itself as the “organization to shepherd you all and work with you all to bring us through this new era of how we how we work”, stated Kathy Pham, Workday’s VP of AI during the Elevate keynote.
Workday sees itself as a system of record for HR and Finance, and now it wants to be the agent system of record.
Speaking on a press panel at Elevate, Pham shared: “Agents are not the same as people, but an agent can take on roles and tasks and skills and components of work.”
This means they need governance, training, monitoring and managing.
Kathy Pham, VP of AI at Workday, on stage at Elevate.
In this context, organizations need to lean into uniquely human skills, like having a curious mindset and continuous learning, stated Angelique de Vries, President of EMEA, Workday, in an Elevate podcast recording.
“We don’t know what we don’t know, we will experience and learn a lot,” added de Vries.
Ting added: “Everyone needs to be a student.”
Paul O’Sullivan, UK CTO at Salesforce, agreed on another press panel that while there’s “immediate inertia that my job is going to be replaced by AI”, but AI will need supervision.
In this context, “creativity” will become the biggest human capability – it’ll allow companies to bring new products, services, to the market, which is something “only humans can do”.
“If we do that supercharged by AI, it is just going to unlock huge potential for businesses in the future,” added O’Sullivan.
A real challenge to date has been seeing value from AI technology – “businesses and enterprises have spent millions and millions of pounds experimenting with this technology, but not realizing value”; to achieve value, “you’ve got to link it back to the business processes that an organization has”.
For Ting, it is “dangerous saying we’re in an AI wave, let’s use AI to solve every problem” – instead companies need to be thoughtful about what problems they need to solve, and figuring out if AI is the right way to solve that problem.
When asked about a call to action for leaders, O’Sullivan from Salesforce shared the need to “think differently” – “the generation today is the last generation of leaders to manage just humans” – they will manage both humans and agents.
O’Sullivan declared that the only limiting factor on businesses is their “own inability to be creative and think differently”.
Want to dig more into the AI in action in HR? UNLEASH is hosting a webinar on Tuesday 3 June on that very topic with speakers from Workday, HPE and Sapient Insights. You can sign up here!
