What’s Next for Microsoft? Leading the Way in 2025
10 Dec, 2024
As Rising EMEA 2024 kicked off in Amsterdam this week, we’re shining a light on the latest innovations coming to the Workday platform in 2025.
Workday’s efforts have been focused on some key areas: AI, UX, Extensibility and Industry, among others. By utilising the latest advances in technology, as well as strategic partnerships within the cloud technology space, the latest innovations are set to continue reshaping the workplace and helping businesses transform their systems and processes.
Let’s take a look at some of the key areas where you, the Workday Customer, can expect to see some exciting features…
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
The overarching theme to all of Workday’s latest innovations is AI, and the technology underpins most of the platform’s new features. They announced Workday Illuminate at Workday Rising in the US in Sept 2024; the next generation of Workday AI. The aim of Illuminate is to accelerate and simplify common tasks to reimagine business processes, and it’s available to all customers now.
Illuminate ensures full data privacy for your organisation, but has a model adaptor that’s filtered for you, and the context of your business. There are no special implementations or requirements involved, you just have to turn it on.
There are plenty of new features that are, or will be, powered by Illuminate:
- New AI Agents - Recruiter Agent, Succession Agent, Expenses Agent, and Workday Optimise. These agents will help to streamline and automate business processes within the platform, pre-empting issues, organising workflows, and identifying actions that will lead to more strategic and meaningful work. Recruiter Agent is already available within HiredScore, and the other agents will have Early Access availability in 2025.
- Workday Assistant - Workday Assistant will help employees search and find information within your Workday system instantly, working with real-time data. You’ll also receive insights and recommendations to complete tasks more efficiently. Workday Assistant within Adaptive Planning is also in the pipeline, so you can plan better using real-time data and insights. Workday Assistant will be generally available in early 2025, and integrations with Slack and Microsoft Copilot are also in the works.
Alongside recent AI-driven acquisitions, such as HiredScore and Evisort, and constant advancements in Workday’s AI capabilities, like AI Gateway within Extend, Workday’s AI offering is advancing at an unbelievable pace.
User-Centric Approach to Experience (UX)
Workday are focusing on a data-driven approach to UX, leveraging AI-enhanced experiences.
They’re specifying three key areas of optimisation:
- Improved findability - Workday Assistant will help Workday users ask questions and find the information they need on your platform instantly.
- Simple Task Completion – Workday Assistant will also provide insights and make recommendations to simplify and enhance common tasks. Users will be able to easily access company information and policies during task processes, for example, reducing completion time and elevating outcomes.
- Meet you in your flow of work – Workday are committed to providing a ‘connected experience’, by facilitating better collaboration and 3rd party integrations. Their ‘Workday Everywhere’ approach will help streamline processes. Through partnerships with Microsoft and Salesforce, Slack, Teams and Copilot integrations are on the cards for early 2025. Their aim is for Workday to be the ‘centre of gravity’ for People & Money, creating a unified experience for your Workday users.
Extensibility
Workday Partners and Customers are already breaking boundaries with Extend. With Workday’s 3x Innovation approach, customers can utilise capabilities built by Workday, Partners, and themselves/other customers.
Workday Extend allows Customers and Partners to use a low-code, no-code tool set to build and deploy new HR and Finance capabilities natively on your platform, powered with AI efficiencies from the likes of AI Gateway and AI Marketplace.
At the time of presenting at Rising EMEA, 2,000 apps were in production, and 1,000 customers and 30 Partners were building with Extend. 3rd party integrations and custom apps for your business? Extend makes it possible.
Workday have introduced some new features to Extend that will continue to revolutionise the system:
- Visual App Building - You’ll be able to collaborate faster across your business, with visual UI mode creating a faster building experience across departments.
- Developer Co-Pilot – AI Assistants in Extend can now turn your prompts into code, so you can build custom app pages quickly and accurately.
Both of these features are available to all Workday Customers.
Industry-Specific Focus
Workday have done a lot of work towards creating industry-specific solutions. With Industry-specific apps, Industry Summits, and the announcement of new Workday Partner Industry Accelerators this year, it’s a key area they're investing in.
These new features are built with industry and sector contexts in mind. The new AI Agents will help guide your organisation through industry-related governance and compliance issues. Furthermore, the increased ability to produce industry-specific apps will help bring people, money and operational data into a unified data model and facilitate collaboration within the platform.
Cloud ERP/HCM solutions that target different industries has been a welcome development. Workday remains at the forefront of industry-specific innovations, and continued investment and work in this area will only improve functionality and consolidate their status as a top vendor in this space.
Workday is at front and centre when it comes to workplace and business transformation. Leveraging new AI capabilities, user-centric innovations and offering flexibility to you, the Workday customer, allows you to enhance your decision-making, streamline your business processes, and adapt to ever-evolving challenges. We can’t wait to see the real-time outcomes of these innovations as they emerge in 2025.
Whether you’re a new Workday customer, or you have a mature system on board, evolving your Workday platform is paramount to maximising the ROI for your system. You’ve got to have the right people on board to make this happen. Focus on WD are 100% committed to recruitment within the Workday space, so our knowledge, network and creative solutions are unmatched. Get in touch today to find out how we can help get your Workday programme into better shape, and ready for innovation in 2025.
