Workday Rising, Workday’s annual customer conference, held recently in Barcelona, unveiled a range of new artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities along with updates to the company’s partner ecosystem.

These innovations are designed to assist businesses in enhancing productivity, streamlining business processes, empowering their workforces and facilitating informed decision making.

Emma Chalwin, chief marketing officer at Workday, shared the six core values that inspire everything Workday currently does while presenting her keynote address. “Our first two are employees and customer service. It’s been a hard, long-held belief that happy employees equals happy customers. And we have over 10 000 customers globally with over 2 000 here in Europe, and more than 18 000 workmates. Trust is at the core of our partnerships, and we’re focused on taking great care of our workmates, so they in turn, can take great care of our customers.”

Next, she cited innovation and integrity. “Throughout today’s keynote, we’ll give you a comprehensive look at the innovation we’re delivering across the Workday platform including a glimpse into how the future will work with the power of Workday AI as well as the ethical approach that we’re taking. In fact, we bring integrity and ethical practices into every aspect of our business including how we run our events, whether it’s focusing on more sustainable practices, or supporting the broader community with activations.”

Finally, Chalwin said it’s about profitability and fun. “Our success equals our partners’’ success, and that’s why profitability is another important core value. We are focused on delivering value and it’s our hope that we make our customers a success too. Last but not least, a value that’s near and dear to all of our hearts is having fun while we do all of this.”

The only constant is change

Speaking about the world we live in today, she said if there’s one thing that we know, it’s that the only constant is change. “Today’s business landscape is moving and changing faster than ever. The ability to operate with speed and stay one step ahead of the competition is absolutely critical. And the explosion we are seeing in AI is arguably one of the most transformational technology trends of our lifetime and in fact probably the most important since the introduction of the cloud.”

She said all Workday’s customers are at the forefront of this change, and that Workday wants to be a trusted partner for them throughout this journey. “We’re committed to providing you with the enterprise platform that you need to transform your business so that together we can shape how the future works. AI is impacting the world of work unlike anything we’ve ever seen before and we know that this technology is understandably raising concerns. If not applied in an ethical and responsible way, AI can lead to negative outcomes. But at Workday, we not only think about how to implement this technology differently from any other enterprise software company in the world, but we’ve also been experimenting with and leveraging it for over a decade.”

None of our products is intended to replace what a human does. They’re intended to make a person better at what they do

According to Chalwin, while many other companies are scrambling to catch up or even just get started, at the highest level, the company leverages Workday AI with a heavy emphasis upon improving the human experience and using this technology to help make people more productive, better informed and enabling them to solve problems they didn’t think that they could solve before. “None of our products is intended to replace what a human does. They’re intended to make a person better at what they do.”

AI as part of the natural workflow

In ending she highlighted three core differentiators that are fundamental to everything Workday does with AI. “AI is embedded into our platform, and has been for several years. Doing this enables our applications to natively leverage AI as part of the natural workflow, which results in the workday API being treated like any other feature within Workday. You switch it on, and it’s ready to go. Next, we know that AI requires large volumes of quality data to train properly from day one, and Workday was designed as a multi-tenant cloud with a unified data model. This means that all customers are on the same version of Workday, and as a result, all data in Workday follows a uniform structure that provides clean and coherent data with which we can train our ML models.”

This translates to more than 65 million users under contract, representing more than 600 billion transactions per year, making up the volume of clean coherent data the company can potentially leverage.

“Finally, trust. We firmly believe that for AI to deliver on its potential it must be trustworthy, and trust must be designed into its foundation from the start. We focus on providing our customers with transparency and a clear understanding of how our models are developed and addressed to help mitigate any risks associated with their use.”