Around 10,000 companies including many of the world’s largest corporations will gain access to new staff recruitment software enhanced by artificial intelligence.
Workday, which specialises in human resource and financial management software, showcased the upgrade in Las Vegas at its annual “Workday Rising” event.
The ability to recruit and select staff is made available by the introduction of “agents” into Workday’s software arsenal. Agents are like AI-chatbots and are a buzzword in the corporate world with Salesforce and Europe’s SAP among other software developers introducing them.
But they go further than Chatbots, with an ability to execute a series of tasks to perform common business workflows.
Dedicated AI tools are already reshaping recruitment across the world, but Workday is adamant that machines will never control human selection.
Kathy Pham, vice president of artificial intelligence at Workday, told The Australian that human participation and scrutiny would always be an essential part of Workday’s implementation of AI.
“We’re a deeply human business, which is people and finance,” Ms Pham said. “There will always be a human in the loop to make that final decision. It’s something that will not ever change here.”
This year’s agent initiatives follow last year’s landmark introduction by Workday of skill sets, where employees list dozens of skills and workplace capabilities they have attained such as being a team leader, or a good negotiator, being able to speak a foreign language or operate specific software.
Workday has compiled a refined list of 55,000 skills which its software can use to select staff for specific roles, or to mix and match staff with a variety of skills to create an internal task force.
The company was downgrading, but not discounting, the importance of tertiary education in the workplace.
This year, generative AI will let agents and other AI-enhanced software understand and use years of text-based documents stored by companies to perform automated tasks.
To that end, Workday has signed an agreement to acquire Evisort, an AI platform that will add AI-powered document intelligence solutions across Workday’s finance and HR suite.
“More than 80 percent of business data is unstructured and organised in a way that’s not easy to search, analyse, or act upon,” the company said in a statement. “This includes data in contracts, invoices, and policy documents.
“With Evisort’s powerful AI capabilities, Workday will enable its customers to surface critical insights within this untapped data to make key business decisions and take action faster than ever before.”
Workday announced the further infusion of AI across its platform under the title “Workday Illuminate”, with the company processing more than 800 billion business transactions annually.
Then there were the agents. Last year Workday announced separate capabilities such as using AI to create job descriptions, write resumes, or select employees for committees.
This year, agents can decide on the tasks needed to perform a request made by staff in everyday language and decide on and execute a series of tasks to complete the request.
“This requires working across multiple teams and making sure our compliance and our security are completely in order, especially (when handling) enterprise data,” Ms Pham said.
The “Recruiter Agent” that adds AI to staff recruitment and selection is one of four announced at the conference. It creates job descriptions, sources candidates, and schedules interviews. AI provides insights into candidate profiles.
Expenses Agent prompts travelling employees to upload receipts, and then matches receipts with credit card transactions, and creates expense reports.
The Succession Agent helps managers seek out replacements before they move jobs, a function which Ms Pham said was in increasing demand with employees changing jobs and switching companies more frequently.
The Optimize Agent identifies administrative bottlenecks and inefficiencies – deviations from best practice. Staff otherwise spend hours trying to address this manually.
Recruiter Agent is available now in HiredScore, a recent Workday acquisition; the rest will be available in 2025.
Workday has been collaborating with Salesforce which announced its own extended AI functionality and agents at its Dreamforce conference. Salesforce customers such as Adobe, Walmart and Amazon will be able to summon agents and interrogate customer relations management data from Salesforce channels within Slack.
Ms Pham said customers of both Workday and Salesforce would be able to use agents that queried both platforms’ data.
Workday chief product officer David Somers said the company was also looking at letting customers build their own agents, a feature Salesforce had been adopting.
Workday also released a new Workday Assistant. Employees can use everyday language to get answers about inconsistencies in their paycheck; the Workday Assistant will access company documents to seek an explanation.
Published in The Australian newspaper, September 24, 2024