Workday sees AI as a tool to bolster the role of HR leaders

AI momentum is moving forward. More than 40% of US businesses are leveraging paid subscriptions to AI models, platforms, and tools, according to the Ramp AI index, which measures AI adoption among American businesses. That’s more than double the adoption since this time last year.

As employers grapple with AI enablement, HR leaders have emerged as central figures helping teams manage the integration of AI into the workforce.

For HR departments, with leaders already fluent in compliance, risk, and change management, it’s a natural—if accelerated—extension of their responsibilities.

“HR has always been responsible for organizational design and workforce design, and this is that on steroids,” said Aashna Kircher, group general manager of CHRO products at Workday. They are “looking at functions, determining which functions are going to be most heavily disrupted, how to redeploy talent and the people in those areas.”

That responsibility now includes more than just people management, but agentic AI management as well. Organizations must track AI agents’ deployment, manage their training data, and understand how they’re affecting outcomes across the business.

Kircher also pointed out that HR is responsible for shaping and measuring employee experience and how teams feel about and connect to their work, as well as reskilling and learning and development (L&D).

Agentic governance. Companies increasingly need tools to help manage AI’s use, training, and performance, as well as keep up with the compliance requirements to deploy such tech at work.

For many organizations, according to Kircher, HR leaders are taking on that responsibility. And “somewhat ironically,” AI tools in the HR space have freed up more capacity for leaders to work on strategic HR design amid the AI transformation, she added. For Workday, it made sense to manage AI agents inside the platform already designed to do that, for human talent.

Workday announced earlier this year a new agentic system of record, designed to help companies track and manage AI agents just like employees. It offers centralized management tools, training frameworks, and permission controls—allowing HR, with the support from IT teams, to register workflows, train AI systems, and measure their impacts on business outcomes.

“It was built to be the platform and the foundation that we are using to build our own internal agents for Workday,” Kircher said. “It was also meant to enable other systems to interact and build into Workday...and [be] able to have partner customers build agents that are registered within the enterprise that they want to keep track of.”

With systems in place, HR teams must also help with employee adoption, training, and experience amid the AI transformation. People management still requires HR to manage people, and CHROs and other people leaders are being asked to steer change management efforts so employees understand how AI is being used, and the impact it will have on their work.

HR leaders in AI transformation. “The best customers that I have seen using this technology, use it like a muscle,” Kircher said. “They use the technology to evolve with their business. The customers who are not typically as successful using these kinds of technologies are the customers who look at it as a one and done [project].”

Kircher also noted that HR leaders shouldn’t view this moment in AI transformation as a…moment. As with other technological developments, the HR platforms and techmust evolve with the company and the process to get the most out of new AI tech is constantly changing.

“If you have created a mindset in HR and technology [that] all my systems are muscles that we use—that flex with the business and change with the business—that mindset and that structure should already be there and continues on steroids in this construct," she said. “The tech becomes an enabler of that change.”