Dive Brief:
- Workday is betting the next phase of enterprise AI adoption will be less about assistants that respond to prompts and more about agents that can initiate and carry out tasks — from spotting missing payroll data to preparing accounting entries.
- The company on Tuesday announced new “autopilot” agents designed to work in the background across hiring, payroll, accounting and other business processes.
- “Until now, AI has worked like a copilot — helpful, but only when you ask it something,” Joel Hellermark, chief AI officer at Workday, said in a statement. “That's not enough anymore. Our agents work like autopilots — they get the work done on their own, and bring people in exactly when their judgment makes the difference.”
Dive Insight:
The autopilots were part of a broader set of Tuesday announcements. Workday also introduced a “Trusted Agent Platform” for building custom agents with customers’ preferred AI models, while preserving enterprise permissions and audit trails.
The company also unveiled a “Decision Intelligence” offering, which lets human resources and finance teams develop workforce scenarios and assess their financial implications.
The rollouts come amid growing concerns over the potential for AI agents to act unpredictably and cause harm, with some industry leaders calling for a slowdown in development.
Workday executives acknowledged the backdrop during an Oct. 8 virtual press conference previewing the announcement.
“You all have seen the headlines,” Gerrit Kazmaier, the company’s president of product and technology, said, emphasizing that AI in the enterprise needs to be “reliable, secure and lawful.”
CEO Aneel Bhusri also discussed the importance of safeguards, saying the company’s AI tools are “designed to work within the guardrails.”
As part of its autopilot rollout, Workday introduced a “payroll agent” designed to flag missing data or potential problems before payroll runs. A new “accounting agent” can extract contract details, prepare accounting entries, recommend revenue-recognition and billing schedules, and test transactions for potential problems, according to the release.
Workday also unveiled a “talent acquisition agent” capable of monitoring open positions, identifying roles at risk of missing hiring targets and finding qualified candidates. The agent can also draft recruiter outreach for approval and coordinate interviews.
The talent acquisition agent is available to early adopters, with general availability planned for early 2027, Workday said. The company plans to offer the payroll and accounting agents to early adopters in early 2027.
Customers can decide which actions run automatically, which require review and when a person must make the final decision, according to the Tuesday release. The company said it logs agent activity so customers can manage it along with costs as usage grows.
“Probabilistic AI is great at guessing, but in payroll and finance a good guess isn’t good enough,” Kazmaier said in the release.
