Workday wants to make it easier to manage AI agents

Workday’s new ‘Agent System of Record’ will ease headaches around agentic AI management, the firm claims, as enterprises ramp up the deployment of agents across a range of functions.

The tool enables organizations to manage agents from Workday and third-parties alike, giving businesses features to govern and utilize a new digital workforce.

“As the number and complexity of AI agents grow, organizations of all sizes face a new set of challenges: managing their deployment, ensuring their security and compliance, optimizing their impact, and managing costs,” Workday said.

Workday’s System of Record will work against these challenges, allowing firms to easily onboard and manage new agents.

Through the tool, IT leaders can define the roles and skillsets of new agents, as well as grant them access to relevant data in a secure manner. System of Record allows users to control access and enforce policies to ensure security and compliance.

Real-time visibility functions allow operators to monitor agent activity and track costs, as well as manage oversight into identity verification, agent orchestration, and financial cost. The tool can also set budgets and forecasts for agents.

"The workforce of the future will include both humans and AI agents, and businesses that don't learn to manage this incredibly complex reality will quickly fall behind," Aneel Bhusri, co-founder and executive chair of Workday, said.

"As the system of record for more than 10,500 organizations around the world, there is no one better than Workday to manage every part of the workforce – employees, contingent workers, and agents – on our trusted platform,” Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach said.

Ray Wang, CEO of Constellation Research, said that as enterprises accelerate AI agent deployments, creating a centralized management system will be critical to providing an overview of activities.

Agents set to be a big part of the workforce

Management of agentic workers is likely to become a bigger talking point as firms across the board look to relying more on a digital workforce.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently predicted that the current generation of CEOs will be the last to manage an entirely human workforce. He thinks all future workforces will be partly made up of AI agents.

Benioff also said that Salesforce may not hire any new software engineers in 2025 on the back of internal productivity gains made through AI agent use.

From the rest of the tech scene, firms such as OpenAI, GitHub, Microsoft, AWS, and Google, have all unveiled agentic offerings, signaling the extent to which this new brand of AI is making its way into the enterprise.

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