HCM platform Workday announced this month during its annual customer event in San Francisco a set of new features, capabilities, and acquisitions aimed at improving the way HR and employees use technology to get work done.
“Big changes happen whenever there’s a huge technology shift,” Workday’s Melanie Lougee, VP of product vision, told HR Brew following the announcement at Workday Rising 2025. “If you think about where we’re going from a technology standpoint, but also, what does that mean for HR; What does it mean for HR practitioners to…start thinking and doing things in different ways, Workday has the whole stack.”
The “AI platform for managing people, money, and agents” introduced to its stack the Workday Data Cloud, a new data layer that helps customers extract information and insights from HR and finance data by connecting existing analytics platforms and systems together to create improved intersystem work.
“From an HR practitioner’s standpoint, there are a lot of systems that are out there, and the data is all over the place,” Lougee said.
With the Data Cloud, Workday also announced a partnership with Databricks, Salesforce, and Snowflake to surface additional business data inside the Workday platform and provide people and finance data from Workforce to external systems enterprise companies are already using. The data layer enables “two-way, zero-copy data sharing between Workday and leading data platforms,” according to a news release.
For years these different systems have operated independently of one another or required complicated API or integration processes to communicate between platforms. And even then, data isn’t always congruent.
“We’re coming out of a time where a lot of HR organizations did buying based on an independent department’s priorities,” Lougee said.
She added that an L&D team might procure an LMS platform to meet an organization’s particular skills goals, but when it comes to performance management, HR leaders often procure tools separately. So organizations lack the capacity to connect skills data and performance data, for example, to design intelligent, informed processes to grow talent simply because the infrastructure doesn’t exist to help leaders draw the connections between skills data and performance metrics.
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“When you start looking at being able to do things like internal mobility, for example, and wanting to retain your existing workforce, when you have that across 18 different systems, you can’t do it,” she said. “So by creating a data layer, it’s laying the foundation to be able to build business processes, insights, [and] inferences, with one data source.”
This year, Workday has worked to leverage AI to better connect processes and systems for enterprise clients. In February, the company announced a new Agent System of Record product that allows customers to onboard new AI agents (both Workday agents and third-party ones), define which tasks and duties these agents are responsible for, track their impact, and budget and forecast for them.
This month at Workday Rising, Workday also announced a new way for organizations to pay for and experiment with Workday agents via flex credits. Workday products now come with flex credits, allowing users to tap into the agentic promise of a particular Workday product, but they can purchase additional credits to maximize their value, or use those flex credits to experiment with a different Workday agent all together, but the HR team and the customer are in the driver’s seat about how best to use them for their own business needs.
“Lots and lots of talk about agentic [AI] and agents and all of this, but there’s a lot of barriers to HR being able to adopt some of these things,” Lougee said. “[Workday Flex Credits] removes some barriers to HR being able to experiment.”